LINGUIST List 13.1581

Mon Jun 3 2002

Diss: Discourse Analysis: Wash "Adverbial..."

Editor for this issue: Marie Klopfenstein <marielinguistlist.org>

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1. suzannewash, Discourse Analysis: Wash "Adverbial Clauses in Barbare�o Chumash Narrative"

New Dissertation Abstract

Institution: University of California at Santa Barbara
Program: Department of Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2001
Author: Suzanne Wash
Dissertation Title: Adverbial Clauses in Barbare�o Chumash Narrative
Discourse

Dissertation URL:

Linguistic Field:
Discourse Analysis
Syntax
Typology

Dissertation Director 1: Susanna Cumming
Dissertation Director 2: Wallace Chafe
Dissertation Director 3: Kathryn Klar
Dissertation Director 4: Marianne Mithun
Dissertation Director 5: Kenneth Whistler
Dissertation Abstract:
This dissertation presents the first study of adverbial clauses in
Barbare�o Chumash, an indigenous language of California. It explores the
semantic relations, morphosyntactic structure, and discourse functions of
adverbial clauses in this language, with a view toward what is known and
expected about adverbial clauses crosslinguistically, and from a
functionally-oriented approach to linguistics. Almost all of the data come
from narratives recorded in the 1950s by John P. Harrington from Mary Yee,
the last speaker of the Barbare�o Chumash language.


The dissertation has 24 chapters and is divided into five parts. Part I is
the preliminaries. It includes a detailed grammatical sketch of the
Barbare�o Chumash language. In Part II, I analyze the semantic and
morphosyntactic characteristics of thirteen structurally-distinguishable
adverbial clause types. The adverbial clauses code temporal, conditional,
concessive, purposive, reason/causal, manner, and semantically neutral
relations. Semantically neutral adverbial clauses have both temporal and
conditional meanings, and though most researchers treat such clauses as
conditional, in this study I treat them as a category separate from the
temporal and conditional categories. In Part III, I compare the initial
and final tokens of these clause types with respect to similarities and
differences in structure, extent of scope, and punctuation/prosodic
boundaries. In Part IV, I focus on the similarities and differences in
discourse functions between initial and final clauses that code purposive,
conditional, temporal and semantically neutral relations. In addition to
their qualifying role, the initial adverbial clauses function as pivotal
points of orientation that help create a cohesive and coherent text.
However, the final adverbial clauses only serve to qualify the main
clause. They do not function as pivotal points of orientation in the
texts. These differences between initial and final adverbial clauses are
found crosslinguistically, and reflect the general cognitive processes
involved in the production and comprehension of discourse. Finally, I
conclude this study with the closing remarks in Part V.