UC Santa Barbara UC Santa Barbara Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Many Ways to Sound Diné: Linguistic Variation in Navajo Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2vq427q3 Author Palakurthy, Kayla Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Many Ways to Sound Diné: Linguistic Variation in Navajo A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics by Kayla Pearl Palakurthy Committee in charge: Professor Marianne Mithun, Chair Professor Eric Campbell Professor Matthew Gordon Lorene B. Legah, Diné College Emerita June 2019 The dissertation of Kayla Pearl Palakurthy is approved. _____________________________________________ Eric Campbell _____________________________________________ Matthew Gordon _____________________________________________ Lorene Legah _____________________________________________ Marianne Mithun, Committee Chair May 2019 Linguistic Variation in Navajo Copyright © 2019 by Kayla Pearl Palakurthy iii For my Diné friends sik’is Diné danilínígíí iv Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank all of the wonderful participants who volunteered their time and shared their Diné language with me. This project would not have been possible without your interest, openness, and patience. I would especially like to thank Louise Ramone, Barsine Benally, and Melvatha Chee for going above and beyond in helping connect me to interested participants. I am very grateful to Kendralyn Begay for her hard work and professionalism while transcribing and translating the Diné stories. Thank you to my undergraduate research assistants, Mikaela Moore and Steven Castro, for much-appreciated assistance with the English transcription. Thank you to Siri Tuttle and Sarala Puthuval at the Alaska Native Language Archive for their assistance in making these recordings and transcripts available online. This project benefited greatly from classes and conversations at several summer workshops run by the Navajo Language Academy. Thank you to Irene Silentman, Lorene Legah, Barsine Benally, Ellavina Perkins, Ted Fernald, Willem de Reuse, Alessandro Jaker, Ignacio Montoya, Jasmine Spencer, Irene Tsosie, Johnny Harvey, Louise Ramone, Leroy Morgan, Rose Gambler, Joan Cooley, Tom Warren, Theresa Begay, Peggy Speas, Kelsey Dayle John, and many others for your friendships and teaching over the years. Thank you to Melvatha Chee and Geneva Becenti for helpful suggestions and insightful conversation at the 2018 NLA summer meeting. I am grateful for the help of Tamara Billie at the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department. ’Ahéhee’. A heartfelt thanks to my dissertation committee, especially my advisor and dissertation chair, Marianne Mithun. Thank you for your endless enthusiasm, for sharing your immense expertise of North American languages, for your consistent support as I finished up remotely, and for always helping me find answers to the most interesting linguistic questions. Thank you to Matt Gordon for your patience, detailed feedback, and enthusiasm for my many phonetics questions. Thank you to Eric Campbell for a great Field Methods course and for always providing useful and thoughtful feedback on everything from work logs to dissertation chapters. Finally, thank you to Lorene Legah for many wonderful conversations, classes, and careful feedback. You have greatly influenced how I think about the Diné language, and my work is much improved as a result. ‘Ayóo naa ’ahééh nisin. At UC Santa Barbara, I am grateful to all of the Linguistics faculty for their mentorship and teaching over the years. Besides my committee members, I would especially like to thank Mary Bucholtz, Pat Clancy, Stefan Gries, Lal Zimman, and the late Wally Chafe. Thank you to Alicia Holm and René Marchington for the help in navigating the many requirements, and to Paula Ryan and Angie Wallace at ISBER for managing my National Science Foundation grant. I am grateful to have received financial support in my graduate training and research. Thank you to the Graduate Division at UC Santa Barbara for funding me through a Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship, and to the National Science Foundation for awarding me a Graduate Research Fellowship and a Documenting Endangered Languages Program Dissertation Improvement Grant. I would like to thank my fellow UCSB graduate students and friends, especially the participants of the 2015–2016 Field Methods class including Griselda Reyes Basurto. A special shout out to Jessica Love-Nichols and Morgan Sleeper for many memorable moments from dancing at each other’s weddings to road-tripping across the Southwest. Thank you as v well to Megan Lukaniec for the meaningful chats, some very good laughs, and for bringing me into the AIGSA community. I first discovered linguistics as an undergraduate, and I continue to be grateful to the faculty in both the Linguistics and Russian Departments at Dartmouth College. Those early classes sparked a lifelong curiosity about language and love of learning that directly contributed to my decision to pursue a Ph.D. in linguistics. Thank you also to the faculty and students in the Berkeley Linguistics Department for welcoming me so warmly these last few years; my work has greatly benefited from many talks, research groups, and informal conversations on campus. Outside of the Linguistics department, thank you to Justin Davidson and the LVC group, the D lab, and BIDS for help with statistics. I am incredibly fortunate to have the unquestioning, constant support of my friends and family. Thank you to my parents for enabling and encouraging my love of language throughout my life and for your genuine interest in always learning about what exactly it is that I do. Thank you to my in-laws, my siblings, and my wonderful friends for providing important companionship during some of the lonelier periods of dissertation writing. Finally, I want to thank my husband, Syam, for moving down to Santa Barbara, for a never-ending supply of humor and curiosity, and for continuing to generate such cutting-edge linguistic ideas. Thank you for sharing this, and every adventure, with me. vi Vita Kayla Palakurthy [email protected] EDUCATION 2019 Ph.D. in Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara. Emphasis in Applied Linguistics and Certificate in College University Teaching. 2015 MA in Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara. 2009 BA in Linguistics and Russian (Magna cum Laude), Dartmouth College. PUBLICATIONS INVITED Community-based Sociolinguistic Variation. In Carmen Jany, Marianne Mithun, and Keren Rice (eds.) Handbook of Languages and Linguistics of North America. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. 2019 The role of similarity in sound change: Variation and change in Diné affricates. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 25(2). (Forthcoming, Fall 2019). 2019 Prosody in Diné Bizaad Narratives: A Quantitative Investigation of Acoustic Correlates. International Journal of American Linguistics. (Forthcoming, Fall 2019) 2019 Variation in Diné bizaad Collection. Archived collection at the Alaska Native Language Archive (ANLA). 46 items including audio recordings and transcriptions. Online at https://www.uaf.edu/anla/collections/search/result.xml/index.xml?collection=64. 2018 The Changing Sounds of Exceptionally Aspirated Stops in Diné bizaad (Navajo). Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, 24(2). 2018 Syntactic Annotation of a Hupa Text Corpus. Proceedings of the 2017 Dene (Athabaskan) Languages Conference. (Co-authored with Justin Spence, Zoey Liu, and Tyler Lee-Wynant). 2017 Marking the Unexpected: Evidence from Navajo to Support a Metadiscourse Domain. Studies in Language, 41(4): 843–871. HONORS AND AWARDS 2018 Best Student Abstract Award, New Ways of Analyzing Variation 47, New York, New York. 2009 Cloise Appleton Crane Prize in Russian, Dartmouth College. 2009 Pray Modern Language Prize in Russian, Dartmouth College. vii FELLOWSHIPS AND GRANTS 2017 Documenting Variation in Navajo (nav), Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (1713793), National Science Foundation Documenting Endangered Languages Program. 2014 Graduate Student Fellowship (2014178334), National Science Foundation. 2013 Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship, University of California, Santa Barbara. PRESENTATIONS Academic conferences 2019 The Status of Sibilant Harmony in Diné bizaad. Paper presented at the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas annual meeting. New York, New York. January 3. 2018 The Role of Similarity in Sound Change: Variation and Change in Diné Affricates. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 47, New York, New York. October 19. 2018 Describing nít’e ̨́e ̨́’ in Diné stories: An Analysis of a Multi-functional Particle. Paper presented at the Dené (Athabaskan) Languages Conference. Smith River, California. May 31. 2018 Variation and Change in the Diné Discourse Particle nít’e ̨́e ̨́’. Paper presented at the University of California, Davis Symposium on Language Research. Davis, California. May 25. 2018 Past Time and New Action: An Analysis of the Diné particle nít’e ̨́e ̨́’. Paper presented at the Workshop of American Indigenous Languages 21. Santa Barbara, California. April 21. 2018 The Changing Sound of Navajo Affricates. Paper presented at the Berkeley Linguistics Society 44. Berkeley, California. February 9. 2018 Sociolinguistic Variation in Diné Stops. Paper presented at the