This dissertation investigates the prosodic system of Uyghur, a Turkic language spoken primarily in Northwest China and Central Asia. Drawing from a usage-based, functional-typological perspective, the studies reported here seek to build on the current understanding of stress assignment, the relationship between stress and intonation, and the relationship between syntax and prosody in Uyghur. These questions are of particular urgency given the language’s precarious sociopolitical context, which threatens its transmission and vitality.The analysis is grounded in naturalistic speech data, primarily from the Corpus of Conversational Uyghur, an original collection of spoken Uyghur dialogues recorded in diaspora communities. These conversations provide a rich, ecologically valid source of linguistic data, which I argue is particularly important for investigating prosody. The dissertation also engages with phonetic data and leverages theoretical models within the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) framework to analyze intonation.Chapter 2 addresses stress assignment, testing predictions from various descriptive accounts using acoustic measurements and regression modeling. Results indicate a complex picture of stress and offer support for a number of features mentioned in the literature: a general tendency for stress to align near the right edge of the word, lexical and morphological exceptions, and weight-sensitivity.Chapter 3 investigates phrase-level prosody and focus marking in Uyghur. Contrary to existing AM models which describe Uyghur as a purely edge-prominence language, findings from natural speech reveal two distinct strategies for marking focus: (1) the expected strategy of pitch range expansion on the edge tones of an Accentual Phrase, and (2) an alternative strategy involving pitch peaks on medial syllables, which I propose may be best analyzed as pitch accents on stressed syllables. This finding suggests that Uyghur intonation includes both edge- and head-marking features, calling for a revision of its classification and indeed a revision of the existing typology of phrase-level prominence.Chapter 4 explores the relationship between prosody and syntax in Uyghur. It analyzes prosodic patterns associated with constituents in non-canonical positions, particularly post-predicate elements, demonstrating that these positions are often accompanied by distinctive intonational cues and boundary tones. Additionally, the chapter presents written corpus data as evidence of ongoing diachronic processes of grammaticalization, arguing that prosody plays a key role in the fusion of syntactic elements into morphological units.Drawing on data from natural contexts, this dissertation advances our understanding of Uyghur prosody while contributing to broader typological debates about stress systems and the interaction between prosody and syntax. Methodologically, it demonstrates the value of naturalistic corpora in complementing experimental approaches to prosodic analysis. The findings also support community-driven documentation and preservation efforts by deepening the descriptive and theoretical account of Uyghur’s phonological structure
