Intonation in Beaver Athapaskan Preliminary Findings

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Northern Athapaskan
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.585.3450; http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/jun/Workshop2007ICPhS/beavinton-Beaver Athapaskan.pdf

Studies in Athapaskan prosody are numerous but usually focus on word-level phenomena, such as tone or stress. However, there is a beginning in-terest in studies on Athapaskan intonation (Rice & Hargus, 2005). In this paper preliminary findings from a study of intonation of Beaver Athapaskan are presented. Beaver is a Northern Athapaskan language spoken by about 150 people in Northern Alberta and Northern British Columbia. It is not acquired by children anymore, the majority of speakers being in their six-ties or older. The study is based on data (stories, a map-task, a guessing game) from fieldtrips to Northern Alberta, and thus represents one of the four dialects of the language. Since the language has not been written until recently, reading tasks cannot be conducted. Beaver is a polysynthetic lan-guage with lexical tone; the Northern Alberta dialect has a marked high tone. The tonal inventory of Beaver is far from clear, still a provisional sur-vey of tones found in the corpus will be given. A final L % usually marks declaratives, it is also accompanied by a reduced loudness and can for para-