THE DISTRIBUTION OF RELATIVE CLAUSES IN KAZAKH CONVERSATIONS
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Date
2024-04-25
Authors
Akanov, Akyl
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Publisher
Nazarbayev University School of Sciences and Humanities
Abstract
In conversation, speakers need to track the referents they introduce, establishing their identity and thereby building common ground with the hearer. This communicative need can be achieved through relative clauses (RCs), among other linguistic means. While most studies have traditionally focused on the formal syntactic properties of RCs, either in a language-specific or cross-linguistic perspective, other studies in usage-based model of language have focused on the variation of RCs in naturally occurring discourse, including conversations. These studies suggest that the distribution of RCs in naturally occurring discourse is affected by a number of linguistic, cognitive, and discourse-related factors such as word order, information flow, markedness, humanness status of the referent in the head noun phrase, and functions of RCs, among others.
Under the framework of Discourse and Grammar, I focus on relative clause constructions in the Kazakh language and explore the skewed distributional patterns of RCs as influenced by a number of linguistic, cognitive, and discourse-related factors that govern communication. Through the analysis of approximately 300 minutes of naturally occurring informal conversations from the Multimedia Corpus of Modern Spoken Kazakh, I have found that the distribution of relative clauses in Kazakh conversations exhibits statistically significant skews. I argue that these skewed patterns are best predicted by the interplay of the semantic factor of Humanness, the cognitive factor of Information Status as well as the grammatical factor of Function of the RC.
The findings support the view that discourse is always driven by the communicative goals of interactants, and that, consequently, grammar is a crystallization of such recurrent linguistic behavior. As such, this work corroborates the importance of studying linguistic structures in their ‘social habitat’ — everyday social interactions. Most importantly, this study contributes to a holistic representation of Kazakh, whose grammatical descriptions, as of now, are mostly based on introspection, written language, and idealized language use, with only few works analyzing spoken data from fieldwork interviews.
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Type of access: Open Access
Citation
Akanov, A. (2024). The Distribution of Relative Clauses in Kazakh Conversations. Nazarbayev University School of Sciences and Humanities