The Creation of Narrative Space: The Directional System of Upper Tanana

Abstract

This thesis shows how one portion of Upper Tanana Athabascan spatial language, the directionals, is used by storytellers to create detailed maps and descriptions of story settings. Additionally, this thesis also shows how the storytellers of Northway and Tetlin are able to use their intimate knowledge of the landscape to pick frames-of-reference and uses of directionals which are best suited to describe a narrative episode. That is, directionals may be used to both describe the immediate environment of a story—or the motion or orientation of objects in the surroundings—or to inform the audience of characters headings or locations throughout the whole valley. A subset of the Upper Tanana directional system is a lexical class of directionals adverbs anchored to rivers which create an absolute system of direction described as an ‘intermediate absolute landmark’ system (Levinson 2003:91). These Athabascan ‘riverine directionals’ are commonly reported to be abstracted from a major river, the Tanana River in this instance, in a series of non-overlapping regions. Via an analysis of spatial forms in Northway and Tetlin narratives, however, this thesis shows that Upper Tanana riverine directionals are abstracted from more than one river in the valley and thus the system can be divided into a set of smaller zones—which I term a ‘secondary riverine layer’—enclosed within the larger regional one. This adds another level of precision to storytellers already robust repertoire of spatially descriptive constructions used to describe narrative spaces. While substantial research on Athabascan directionals, and their role in narrative, has already been accomplished, descriptions of the Upper Tanana directional system are sorely lacking. Thus, this thesis looks at the linguistic form and function of the system in the language and examines how they are used in spontaneous discourse. I determined that the directionals of Upper Tanana, which are linked to Northway and Tetlin people’s way of life and the landscape they inhabit, should be examined in their broader cultural and environmental context. Thus, in addition to analyzing the corpus of recorded Upper Tanana narratives I visited and lived in the villages of Northway and Tetlin to conduct elicitation and interview sessions with Upper Tanana speakers and to pursue ethnographic research. These broad research methodologies allowed me a fuller and more contextualized understanding of how the system functions and I present here the results of my research. This thesis adds to the literature on the use of Athabascan directionals in narrative and provides the first in-depth description of the system and its narrative uses in the Upper Tanana language. The directional system is an important resource in Upper Tanana storytellers’ creation of text-worlds which can be scaled to fit the descriptive needs of a narrative episode. In turn, this illustrates the comprehensive knowledge the Northway and Tetlin people have of their landscape and how they are able to create narrative events which can be followed both “like a map” and “just like being there”.