Fieldwork Forum (FForum)

This meeting will be a discussion of (slides of) a presentation delivered by Lisa Matthewson (University of British Columbia) at the 42nd meeting of the Northeast Linguistics Society (NELS). The slides can be found here. The presentation is a counterargument to Evans and Levinson's proposal that Universal Grammar is inconsistent with linguistic diversity.

Southern Zapotec is an areal-genetic grouping of 8-10 languages with certain common (both inherited and diffused) features including head-marking, leftheadedness, VSO argument order, historical deletion of unstressed vowels, a lack of plural marking, prefixed classifiers, and inclusory contructions containing quantifiers, among others. These languages are extinct in some communities, relatively vibrant in others, and threatened to some degree in most or all. The vibrancy varies both according to community and to generation, with the shift taking place (now and earlier) relatively quickly in some towns, such that many children acquired Spanish mostly from Zapotec-dominant speakers who themselves spoke accented Spanish, somewhat akin to the formation of Hiberno English. Most speakers today are bilingual in Zapotec and Spanish. When speaking Spanish in the Southern Zapotec region one will encounter second language speakers with varying degrees of a Zapotec accent, but likewise monolingual Spanish speakers also display influence from Southern Zapotec in their use of Spanish, for example through a calqued construction to form polar questions, which speakers of other varieties of Spanish misunderstand and perceive as ungrammatical. This talk will catalog many of the ways (from phonetics through pragmatics) that Southern Zapotec languages have influenced regional Spanish.

In the context of language endangerment, sociolinguistic research can be difficult without the existence of what were once vital speech communities. In this presentation, I discuss the recoverability of some forms of variation in Hupa, a California Athabaskan language, through a combination of fieldwork with remaining speakers, and a mining of past texts, recordings, and archived sources for comparison. In this way, some dialectal, stylistic and generational differences in Hupa storytelling can yet be observed.

Chechen (Nakh, Nakh-Daghestanian, Caucasus) data shows the equipollent aspectual oppositions, and a range of different aspectual types (focalized and durative continuous, iterative, habitual, iterative habitual, focalized, and durative continuous habitual, etc.). A huge number of synthetic and analytic tense forms (more than 40 forms) require the speaker to make precise distinctions. Chechen verb morphology allows no default meaning of any category. Chechen also has an equipollent evidential system with a witnessed/unwitnessed distinction and no default unmarked category.

One feature of the Mesoamerican linguistic area is the use of relational nouns. These are often manifested as body part words in many languages throughout Mesoamerica. For several Zapotec languages, it has been claimed that locatives are historically or synchronically derived from body part terms, but that the locative forms have all been grammaticalized as prepositions. In this presentation, I explore the use of Choapan Zapotec body part locatives to address whether these should be categorized as nouns or prepositions in Choapan. Though body part locatives are phonologically the same as their non-locative counterparts, phonological realizations have little to do with syntactic category. Applying diagnostics from Lillehaugen and Sonnenshein (in press), I assess the morhpological and syntactic properties of body part locatives in Choapan, and how they differ from or pattern with regular nouns and prepositions. I will demonstrate that body part locatives in Choapan Zapotec are morphologically and syntactically nouns, and not prepositions.

Linguistic fieldwork can take us to places very unlike those in which we usually live and work — to places in which our usual assumptions, habits, and expectations do not apply; and to places in which the social and material resources available to us may be very different, or very limited, compared to our familiar home environment. Therefore, a crucial part of preparing ourselves for a successful linguistic fieldwork project is (a) assessing the ways that our project may impact our health and safety, and (b) taking appropriate steps in advance that will enable us to maximize our health and safety once we undertake our fieldwork project. The goals of this talk are two: (1) to outline the key areas of consideration regarding our health and safety during fieldwork — including our physical, mental, and social health; and (2) to provide a set of strategies for preventing and solving problems that may arise during fieldwork in any of these health areas. This talk is based primarily on my fieldwork experiences over the last 17 years in Amazonia — in both solo and team-based projects — but the core content is generalizable to a variety of fieldwork situations, undertaken anywhere in the world.

Breath of Life is a one-week workshop developed here at Berkeley and co-hosted by Berkeley and the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival every other summer. It is generally attended by 50-60 California Indians, along with about 20 faculty and grad student mentors from here and elsewhere who work closely with the Native participants.

We will talk about the history of this venerable workshop, which has been held here since the early 1990's, and about the upcoming one this summer, June 3-9.

I will also describe the duties and pleasures of being a mentor, in hopes of attracting some of the Fforum folks to be part of it!

Tone, Stress, and Accent in Karuk (Clare Sandy)

Languages that do not fall neatly into the categories of prototypical tone or stress languages pose theoretical and descriptive challenges. Some of these languages, such as Karuk, have been described as having accent or pitch accent, but accent is a vague term which may be used to describe quite different prosodic systems. Some have been characterized as simplified tone or stress systems, but this fails to capture the complexity of languages such as Karuk. In Karuk, two surface tones (H, HL) contrast on stressed syllables and additional contrastive tonal behaviors are found in word-final position. Several sets of affixes trigger varying changes in stem accentuation. Karuk's prosodic system was meticulously described by Bright (1957) in accentual terms, and was more recently characterized in terms of tone and stress (Macaulay 1990, Crowhurst and Macaulay 2007), but it has so far defied a comprehensive analysis.

The current work shows that many of the most common tone patterns in both roots and derived forms can be accounted for by related phonological factors including tone-foot alignment, avoidance of H on closed (C)VC syllables, and stress-weight alignment. I show that the most important division between stems that are and are not affected by tone-shifting processes can be defined in terms of a combination of tone and metrical structure, thus motivating and unifying some of these processes. In doing so, I am able to unify H and HL tones. The same parameters active in determining tone shifts under affixation are also responsible for the static distributions of tones in a great number of roots, resulting in the Karuk system being far more predictable than has previously been thought.

In this hour I will demonstrate how to use and configure FLEx-TeX, a cross-platform utility for converting a FLEx or Toolbox linguistic database into a fully formatted LaTeX dictionary. My hope is to demystify the experience as much as possible, and the best way to do this is to go through the entire process together. Therefore, if interested, feel free to bring your computer and follow along. To use the script and adapt it to your field language, you will need:

• The script itself, available from: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~finley/links.html
• A copy of your field database in SF/SFM format, which can be exported from Toolbox/FLEx
• Python 2.x (if you're on Windows; Macs will already have it)
• PyScripter or a similar IDE (again, only necessary for Windows)

This talk argues for the grammaticalization-based origin of three markers of purposive clauses (*-taɾa, *-miɾa and *=senuni) in Proto-Omagua-Kokama (POK), a Tupí-Guaraní (TG) language spoken in northwest Amazonia before the arrival of Europeans. The proto-system survives intact in both descendant languages, Omagua and Kokama-Kokamilla, and is intriguing from a comparative perspective because no other TG language exhibits morphology solely dedicated to encoding purposive clauses. Building off of extant (Jensen 1998) and ongoing reconstructions of Proto-TG, I show that 1) the POK morphemes grammaticalized from TG nominalizers, nominal tense and attributive suffixes, and a spatial postposition, as follows:

**-taɾ AGENTIVE.NOMINALIZER + **-(ɾ)amo ATTRIBUTIVE > *-taɾa PURPOSIVE,

**-βaʔé CLAUSAL.NOMINALIZER + ** -(ɾ)am NOMINAL.FUTURE > *-miɾa PURPOSIVE,

**ts- 3.ABSOLUTIVE + **enoné 'in front of' > *=senuni PURPOSIVE;

2) that this origin accounts for the fact that, synchronically, the distribution of these markers appears to be governed by syntactic requirements on coreference between an obligatorily ellipsed argument in the subordinate clause and the absolutive argument of the matrix clause; and 3) that some of the intermediate steps of these grammaticalization trajectories show parallels in some TG daughter languages, as well as in geographically proximate unrelated languages, which offers tentative insights into prehistoric contact patterns in the region. I situate the talk as a whole within the debate surrounding the creolization-based origin of POK (Cabral 1995, Cabral and Rodrigues 2003), bringing ethnohistorical and (a growing body of) linguistic evidence to bear on the argument that POK is merely a divergent member of Tupí-Guaraní that was spoken as such before the arrival of Europeans.

References

Cabral, Ana Suelly Arruda Câmara (1995). Contact-Induced Language Change in the Western Amazon: The Non-Genetic Origin of the Kokama Language. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.

Cabral, Ana Suelly Arruda Câmara and Aryon Dall'Igna Rodrigues (2003). Evidencias de crioulizaçao abrupta em kokama? PAPIA: Revista Brasileira de Estudos Crioules e Similares 13, 180-186. Edinburgh University Press.

Jensen, Cheryl (1998). Comparative Tupí-Guaraní Morphosyntax. In Desmond C. Derbyshire and Geoffrey K. Pullum (Eds.), Handbook of Amazonian Languages, Volume 4, pp. 489-618. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

This meeting will feature a discussion of language documentation as it relates to the creation of pedagogical materials for the speech community. Please bring your own experiences as they relate to the issue. Two recent articles which discuss the topic can be found here (Francis, 2009) and here (Yamada, 2011).

The Yucatec Maya auxiliary paradigm challenges our expectation that auxiliaries will always descend from lexical verbs (Heine 1993; Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca 1994; Kuteva 2001; Anderson 2006). Instead, Yucatec auxiliaries have grammaticalized from a diverse set of lexemes including nouns, adjectives, and functional particles in addition to verbs. Yucatec auxiliaries are also formally heterogenous, including inflected and fixed forms, bound and free morphemes, prefixes and discontinuous framing constructions. This formal and functional hybridity has led some scholars to question the unity of the Yucatec auxiliary paradigm and subdivide it according to synchronic formal distinctions. However, the evolution of the Modern Yucatec TAM paradigm is well documented in texts and grammatical descriptions produced over five hundred years of contact. Drawing on these sources, this presentation traces the diachronic emergence of the Modern paradigm of Yucatec auxiliaries. The unexpected lexical origins and formal heterogeneity of the paradigm are shown to be a consequence of change in the Yucatec verb complex from Colonial to Modern eras.

Cross-linguistically, the verbal origin of auxiliaries is attributed to their derivation from the first constituent of a [matrix verb-complement] structure, reanalyzed as a [grammatical marker-main verb] construction (Heine 1993; Kuteva 2001). Early Colonial Yucatec manuscripts contain constructions in which adverbial phrases preceded an embedded verb phrase as the matrix predicates of equative constructions. These adverbial phrases, containing many non-verbs, have since been reanalyzed by Modern Yucatec speakers as TAM-marking auxiliaries. While not verbs per se, these syntactic predicates of a [matrix predicate-complement] construction are analagous to the source matrix verbs identified in studies by Heine, Kuteva, and others.

Yucatec grammar provided the following conditions facilitating reanalysis of adverbial phrases as auxiliaries in a fused [auxiliary-verb] construction: (1) the lack of a copula in equative constructions permitted ambiguity to arise from the juxtaposition of matrix predicates with complement verbs; (2) the Mayan preverbal focus position was reinterpreted as part of the verbal complex; and meanwhile, (3) change in the Colonial grammar shifted the role of suffixes from marking dependency between matrix and complement verbs to marking aspect on independent verbs. Finally, processes of analogy extended the paradigm of obligatory preverbal auxiliaries. Overall, the story of Yucatec auxiliaries contributes to our typology of grammaticalization in two ways, by expanding the picture of how auxiliaries arise, and by illustrating the emergence of an entire paradigm, rather than just a single form.

References

Heine, Bernd. 1993. Auxiliaries: Cognitive Forces and Grammaticalization. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kuteva, Tania. 2001. Auxiliation: an Enquiry into the Nature of Grammaticalization. New York: Oxford University Press

Pronominal affixes in polysynthetic languages have an ambiguous status in the sense that they have characteristics normally associated with free pronouns as well as characteristics associated with agreement markers. This situation arises because pronominal affixes represent intermediate stages in a diachronic development from independent pronouns to agreement markers. Because this diachronic change is not abrupt, pronominal affixes can show different characteristics from language to language. By presenting an in-depth discussion of the pronominal affixes of Yurakaré, an unclassified language from Bolivia, I argue that these so-called intermediate stages as typically attested in polysynthetic languages actually represent economical systems that combine advantages of agreement markers and of free pronouns. In terms of diachronic development, such 'intermediate' systems, being functionally well-adapted, appear to be rather stable, and it can even be reinforced by subsequent diachronic developments.