PROSODY AND PRAGMATICS OF EASTERN KHANTY NARRATIVES
The paper outlines the interface of prosodic structure and pragmatic features exemplified by the main clause-types of the endangered Eastern Khanty language of Western Siberia. In line with cross-linguistic typological generalizations, the primary function of intonation in Eastern Khanty is identified as manifesting salient discourse status, signaling topic-focus discourse functions, and delineating discourse components, clauses and phrases. In the reviewed types of Eastern Khanty clauses, general correlation is identified between the pitch accent placement and the discourse pragmatic function of Focus. Pitch accent manifests the part of the proposition containing assertion, new, unrecoverable or unexpected information.
Keywords: endangered languages of Siberia, typology, prosody, pragmatics
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Issue: 9, 2011
Series of issue: Issue 9
Rubric: Samoyed and Ugric Languages
Pages: 139 — 145
Downloads: 1524