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497 Prosody in Diné Bizaad Narratives PROSODY IN DINÉ BIZAAD NARRATIVES: A QUANTITATIVE INVESTIGATION OF ACOUSTIC CORRELATES 1 KAYLA PALAKURTHY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA This article is an empirical examination of prosodic correlates used to demarcate dis- course units in a collection of Diné bizaad narratives. This study builds on observations of prosodic patterns in related Dene languages and evaluates the presence of hypothesized correlates of following pause, syllable lengthening, pitch lowering, and pitch reset at boundaries for intonation units and syntactic sentences. Based on an analysis of nine narratives, I fnd that the Diné narrator marks the majority of her intonation units with a following pause, as well as with signifcant rhyme lengthening in the fnal syllable and a slight, but signifcant pitch reset at the beginning of the unit. The results further show that the narrator marks syntactic sentences with longer following pauses and pitch lowering on unit-fnal syllables along with a unit-initial pitch reset. Together, these results present em- pirical evidence for prosodic marking of discourse units in Diné bizaad connected speech. [KEYWORDS: Diné bizaad, Navajo, Dene languages, prosody, intonation] 1. Introduction. The presence of meaningful intonation is considered to be a universal feature of speech (Hockett 1966; Gordon 2016); speak- ers of all languages use intonation, as well as other prosodic features, to express afect, to indicate information structure, and to demarcate syntactic or discourse-level units (Himmelmann and Ladd 2008). In line with these cross-linguistic tendencies, studies of languages within the Dene (Athabas- kan) family have identifed prosodic correlates for discourse units within personal narratives (Berez 2011; Lovick and Tuttle 2012). In previous stud- ies of discourse in Diné bizaad or Navajo (ISO code: nav), a Dene language spoken in the present-day American Southwest, scholars have similarly re- counted auditory impressions of meaningful prosodic and intonational pat- terns. Specifcally, they describe sentence-fnal pitch falls (Landar 1963; Mithun 2008), the strategic use of pause to create rhetorical momentum (Mithun 2008), and the intentional lengthening of syllables for emphasis 1 I am very grateful to Marianne Mithun for providing these recordings and transcripts, and to Dolly Soulé for sharing these stories. This paper benefted from insightful comments on ear- lier drafts from Marianne Mithun, Matthew Gordon, and Stefan Gries, as well as from the very helpful anonymous reviewers and editors at IJAL. I received additional helpful feedback from conference audiences at SSILA 2017 and ASA 2016. Any remaining errors are my own. This research has been supported by an NSF GRFP Fellowship (2014178334). [IJAL, vol. 85, no. 4, October 2019, pp. 497–531] © 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0020–7071/2019/8504–0001$10.00 DOI 10.1086/7004564 497 498 international journal of american linguistics (Kiser 2014). Yet an instrumental study of Diné bizaad sentences fnds no evidence that speakers prosodically mark sentence boundaries in elicited materials (McDonough 2003a). Given these earlier observations and fol- lowing Berez (2011) and Lovick and Tuttle (2012), the goals of the pres- ent study are to empirically substantiate whether acoustic measurements of pauses, pitch measurements, and syllable length statistically correlate with posited discourse unit boundaries in a set of nine Diné bizaad personal nar- ratives. The forthcoming analysis will show that the narrator, Ms. Soulé, consistently demarcates intonation units with unit-fnal syllable lengthening, pauses, and a slight but signifcant unit-initial pitch reset. At the same time, Ms. Soulé has longer pauses and lower pitch at the ends of her syntactic sentences, as well as a pitch reset in sentence-initial position. The rest of this paper proceeds as follows: in 2, I provide background on Diné bizaad. In 3, I present an overview of cross-linguistic research on prosody and intonation with a focus on results from earlier studies of Dene prosody. 4 includes a description of the nine analyzed narratives, the methods applied to identify the relevant discourse units, and the quantitative methods used to evaluate the presence of pauses of diferent lengths, unit-fnal lengthening, unit-fnal pitch lowering, and unit-initial pitch reset. 5 presents the results for each investigated correlate with evidence for prosodically marked intonation units and syntactic sentences. In 6, I discuss the implications of this research given previous work on Diné bizaad prosody. 2. Background on Diné Bizaad. Diné bizaad is a Southern Dene language spoken predominantly in and around the Navajo Nation in the North American Southwest (ISO 639–3, nav). Though there are more than 150,000 Diné bizaad speakers (Siebens and Julian 2011), the language is threatened by rapid and ongoing intergenerational shift to English (House 2002; Spolsky 2002). The Diné bizaad consonant inventory has 32 phonemes and closely re- sembles that of other Dene languages (McDonough 2003b). The Diné bizaad vowel inventory has four vowels: /i e o a/ with phonemic distinctions for na- sality, tone, and length (Young and Morgan 1987; McDonough 2003b) as well as three diphthongs /ei ai oi/ (Young and Morgan 1987:xii). 2 Table 1 presents the phonemic consonant inventory adapted from McDonough (2003b:6) and Iskarous et al. (2012:197). The Diné language is tonal with a phonological tone target, high or low, for every syllable (McDonough 1999). Falling and rising tonal contours are restricted to long vowels and vowel clusters (Young and Morgan 1987; 2 Nasal vowels are marked in the Diné bizaad orthography with a nasal hook, high-tone vowels are marked with an acute accent, long vowels are written VV, and short vowels, V. Glottal stops are indicated with an apostrophe <’>. prosody in diné bizaad narratives 499 TABLE 1 DINÉ CONSONANTS IN IPA Labial Coronal Lateral Palatal Velar Labialized velar Glottal Obstruents unaspirated p t ts tl tʃkɡw ʔ aspirated th tsh tɬh tʃh kh khw ejective t’ ts’ tɬ’ tʃ’ k’ Fricatives voiceless s ɬʃx h voiced z ʒ ɣ Approximants w l j Nasals m n McDonough 1999; Zhang 2002). The default low tone is said to be more widespread than the high tone, and though tone is lexically contrastive, there are few genuine minimal pairs; tonal contrasts are largely restricted to stems (McDonough 1999). (1) shows a tone minimal pair with contrasting tone on the long vowel. This and all following examples will be written in the Diné bizaad orthography. (1) ’azéé’ ‘mouth, throat, neck’ ’azee’ ‘medicine, drug, herb’ (Young and Morgan 1987:143) Syllables in Diné bizaad typically align with morpheme boundaries (Court- ney and Saville-Troike 2002). In the stem domain, the Diné bizaad syllable structure is CV(V)(C) (McDonough 2003b), while prefxal syllables tend to have a CV syllable structure (McDonough 2003b). Prefxes containing the nasal consonant /n/ followed by a vowel may be realized as a syllabic [n̩ ] with the nasal retaining the tone of the absorbed vowel (Reichard 1951; McDonough 2003b). In terms of morphological structure, Diné bizaad is a polysynthetic language with individual verbs often constituting entire clauses. Full noun phrases are rare in Diné bizaad narratives, and diferent pronominal prefxes are avail- able for speakers to simultaneously track multiple participants within a story (McCreedy 1983). The Diné bizaad verb is prefxing with up to nine pre- fx positions according to the most widespread version of the verb template (Young and Morgan 1987), and verbs must minimally comprise a verb-fnal stem preceded by a classifer and subject/mode prefxes (McDonough 2003b). Enclitics may attach to the verb stem. Verbs tend to occur clause-fnally fol- lowing an SOV order (Young and Morgan 1987). 3. Prosody and intonation. The study of prosody, taken here to refer to patterns of suprasegmental features related to pitch, rhythm, and pauses in spoken language, has been broached by scholars refecting a range of 500 international journal of american linguistics distinct theoretical paradigms. In particular, research on prosody in natu- rally produced spoken discourse has emphasized the relevance of intonation units, streams of speech that occur “under a single prosodic contour” (Chafe 1979, 1987, 1994). Researchers have proposed that intonation units serve cognitive functions in discourse; speakers use intonation units to modulate the amount of new information given at a single moment (Chafe 1994), and experimental tasks show that intonation units facilitate processing due to a connection between the form of an intonation unit and cognitive work- ing memory constraints (Simpson 2016). Other studies fnd that intonation units often align with syntactic clausal or phrasal units (Chafe 1994; Croft 1995) and serve as a frequent site of bilingual code-switches (Shenk 2006). Intonation units have been identifed in many languages, and despite the name, perceptible correlates of intonation unit boundaries consist of more than intonation, defned as “the occurrence of recurring pitch patterns, each of which is used with a set of relatively consistent meanings, either on single words or on groups of words” (Cruttenden 1997:7). Other frequently discussed prosodic correlates for intonation units include following pause, boundary tones, pitch reset, fnal-syllable lengthening, and the manipulation of unit- initial speech rate (Du Bois et al. 1993). Intonation units have been identifed in discourse from Dene languages:
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