The Postlexical Prosody of Central Alaskan Yupik

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This is a project to study the phonetic and phonological elements of Central Alaskan Yupik postlexical prosody; their distribution with respect to each other and with respect to independently motivated syntactic and discourse structures; and their meaning, i.e., their pragmatic value and their use in framing naturally occurring speech of various kinds. Project work involves: (a) two 3-week field trips to Chevak, Alaska, a village where a particular dialect of Central Alaskan Yupik is spoken, in order to construct and record sets of utterances in which potentially independent determinants of postlexical prosody are systematically varied, and to examine prosodic usage in already-existing recordings from Chevak of oral literature and other speech; (b) instrumental and other linguistic analysis of both elicited and naturalistic recordings at the P.I.'s home base; and (c) a period of writing leading to a book on the project's topic. The project is expected to have significance for (a) the documentation and description of Central Alaskan Yupik, a language that is rapidly becoming moribund as fewer and fewer children learn it; (b) the theory of postlexical prosody, by contributing a case study and by exploring the idea that syntax, discourse structure, and interpretation directly determine the distributions of individual prosodic elements; (c) prosodic methodology, by establishing the importance of studying distribution and use side by side, using quantitative data from both repetitive elicitation and natural discourse; and (d) the promotion (via the foregoing) of research on a wide range of languages, especially those studied in the 'field' and faced with imminent extinction.