Dr. Emily Elfner

Prosody and Prosodic Phrasing in Kwak’wala

Kwak’wala is a critically endangered Wakashan language spoken in British Columbia. Owing in part to extensive documentation in the early 20th century by Franz Boas and George Hunt, the language has received significant attention in the linguistic literature. In the realm of phonology, Kwak’wala shows several unusual prosodic features including a typologically rare default-to-opposite stress system at the word level (Boas 1947; Grubb 1969; Shaw 2009), and extensive mismatches between syntactic and prosodic domains at the sentential level (Anderson 2005). Relatively underdescribed, however, are the intonational and tonal properties of words and sentences, and how these correlate with patterns of prosodic prominence and phrasing. In this talk, I provide an overview of word- and phrase-level prosody in Kwak’wala, and propose that prosodic processes in this language conspire to demarcate prosodic word-level domains. I also discuss the implications of this analysis for language documentation and revitalization.