LAUSR

In this paper, we examine the prosodic structure of Y/N Q’s and focus constructions in three related Dene/Athabaskan tone languages spoken in North American: Navajo, Dene Sųline, and North Slavey (Deline), known for their complex polysynthesis, representing a geographically widespread language family, from the American Southwest (Navajo), to northern Alberta (Dene Sųline) to the arctic (North Slavey). These languages share a strikingly similar phonetic inventory and morphological structure. One interesting feature is the phonotactic structure of the morphology—the monosyllabic verb stem is the location of phonemic contrasts: outside the stem the contrasts are severely reduced, making the stems phonemically and phonetically prominent. The stems are the rightmost elements in the verbal complex and in a sentence (verb final). Navajo has been argued to lack any kind of intonational prominence, but the northern languages show more typical prominence marking. In this study we lay out the difference associated to the demarcation of boundaries and prominence: duration and the acoustic correlates of pitch accent events associated with focus and YN/Q’s and boundary marking. Data is taken from conversation games models on map tasks. Findings indicate while phonetically and morphologically similar great variety is found in the prosody.In this paper, we examine the prosodic structure of Y/N Q’s and focus constructions in three related Dene/Athabaskan tone languages spoken in North American: Navajo, Dene Sųline, and North Slavey (Deline), known for their complex polysynthesis, representing a geographically widespread language family, from the American Southwest (Navajo), to northern Alberta (Dene Sųline) to the arctic (North Slavey). These languages share a strikingly similar phonetic inventory and morphological structure. One interesting feature is the phonotactic structure of the morphology—the monosyllabic verb stem is the location of phonemic contrasts: outside the stem the contrasts are severely reduced, making the stems phonemically and phonetically prominent. The stems are the rightmost elements in the verbal complex and in a sentence (verb final). Navajo has been argued to lack any kind of intonational prominence, but the northern languages show more typical prominence marking. In this study we lay out the difference associated ...