The alignment of prosody and clausal structure in Dalabon

Abstract

Comparisons of prosodically defined units and grammatical structure in typologically diverse languages may reveal insights into how language is processed. This paper presents examples of intonation units comprising two or more verbs in Dalabon, a polysynthetic head-marking language from Australia. The prosody, semantics and grammar of these multi-verb intonational units is examined and it is shown that intonation is used as a delimitative device to signal the higher-level groupings of grammatical constituents in the discourse. What is interesting in these findings is that, despite the multiple grammatical constructions available to signal subordination in Dalabon, grammatical subordination i..