Big words, small phrases: Mismatches between pause units and the polysynthetic word in Dalabon
Author
EVANS, N; FLETCHER, J; ROSS, BBDate
2008Source Title
Linguistics: an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciencesPublisher
Mouton de GruyterAffiliation
Languages and LinguisticsMetadata
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Journal ArticleCitations
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 repositoryDescription
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.
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