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    Big words, small phrases: Mismatches between pause units and the polysynthetic word in Dalabon

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    Author
    EVANS, N; FLETCHER, J; ROSS, BB
    Date
    2008
    Source Title
    Linguistics: an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences
    Publisher
    Mouton de Gruyter
    University of Melbourne Author/s
    EVANS, NICHOLAS; Fletcher, Janet; ROSS, BELINDA
    Affiliation
    Languages and Linguistics
    Metadata
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    Document Type
    Journal Article
    Citations
    EVANS, N., FLETCHER, J. & ROSS, B. B. (2008). Big words, small phrases: Mismatches between pause units and the polysynthetic word in Dalabon. Linguistics, 46 (1), pp.89-129. https://doi.org/10.1515/LING.2008.004.
    Access Status
    This item is currently not available from this repository
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/11343/28175
    DOI
    10.1515/LING.2008.004
    Description

    C1 - Refereed Journal Article

    Abstract
    This article uses instrumental data from natural speech to examine the phenomenon of pause placement within the verbal word in Dalabon, a polysynthetic Australian language of Arnhem Land. Though the phenomenon is incipient and in two sample texts occurs in only around 4% of verbs, there are clear possibilities for interrupting the grammatical word by pause after the pronominal prefix and some associated material at the left edge, though these within-word pauses are significantly shorter, on average, than those between words. Within-word pause placement is not random, but is restricted to certain affix boundaries; it requires that the paused-after material be at least dimoraic, and that the remaining material in the verbal word be at least disyllabic. Bininj Gun-wok, another polysynthetic language closely related to Dalabon, does not allow pauses to interrupt the verbal word, and the Dalabon development appears to be tied up with certain morphological innovations that have increased the proportion of closed syllables in the pronominal prefix zone of the verb. Though only incipient and not yet phonologized, pause placement in Dalabon verbs suggests a phonology-driven route by which polysynthetic languages may ultimately become less morphologically complex by fracturing into smaller units.
    Keywords
    Linguistics

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