Events
The Survey sponsors a variety of different events throughout the year, including regular meetings of the Group on American Indian Languages (GAIL), as well as the biennial Breath of Life Workshop. If you would like to receive periodic emails updating you about our activities, join the Friends of the Survey email list.
Current and upcoming events
June 3-9, 2012
Breath of Life Workshop
Past events
April 24, 2012
Group in American Indian Languages
On Word Class and Predication in Karuk
Line Mikkelsen (University of California, Berkeley)
In this talk I examine non-verbal predication in Karuk, an indigenous language of northwest California. Karuk is thought to be part of the Hokan family, and shares the polysynthetic character of the neighboring northern Hokan languages. The example in (1) shows a typical Karuk sentence, in which the verb contains several derivational affixes, expressing event iteration (ip-), purpose (-ar), direction (-uk), and event plurality (-vu) and several inflectional affixes, expressing participant number and person (na-), aspect (durative -tih) and tense (future -heesh):
| (1) | hâari | vúra | xasík |
| sometime | INTENSIVE | then.FUT | |
| na-pi-mus-ar-ûuk-vu-ti-heesh | |||
| 2SG:1SG-ITER-see-PURP-hither-PL.AC-DUR-FUT | |||
| `You can come back to see me sometime.' | |||
| Julia Starritt, "Coyote Marries His Own Daughter" | |||
While verbal predication is the norm, Karuk also exhibits robust nonverbal predication, where a noun, adjective, adverb or quantifier functions as the predicate of the clause. As shown in (2), non-verbal predication exhibits tense marking, but not agreement:
| (2) | Náa | vúra | yâamach-heech |
| 1SG | INTENSIVE | pretty-FUT | |
| `I'm going to be pretty' | |||
| Imkyanváan, "Coyote Doctors a Girl" | |||
The suffix -hi derives verbs from adjectives and nouns and the resulting forms do agree, as the minimal pair in (3) shows. (The sentences in (3) occur in close succession, describing the same eventuality, in Emily Donohue's telling of "The Pikiawish at Katamin".)
| (3) | a. | xás | tá-kóo | pa-'ir |
| then | PERF-all | the-world.renewal.ceremony | ||
| `Then the world renewal was over.' | ||||
| b. | yáas | u-kôo-hi-ti | pa-'ir | |
| then | 3SG-all-VBLZ-DUR | the-world.renewal.ceremony | ||
| `Then the world renewal ended.' | ||||
In (3a), the perfect marker tá attaches to the quantificational root koo `all'. There is no agreement on the resulting form. In (3b), the verbalizing suffix -hi attaches to the same root, koo, followed by the durative suffix -ti, and the resulting form bears 3SG subject agreement (u-).
Bright's (1957) interpretation of this pattern is that (2) and (3a) are instances of non-verbal predication. The tense and aspect markers that cooccur with non-verbal predicates are clitics, and hence not limited to verbal hosts, whereas the agreement markers are affixes that can only attach to verbs. Macaulay (1989) offers a reanalysis wherein tense and aspect marking of seemingly non-verbal predicates always involves verbalizing by -hi, though regular morphophonemic processes conspire to obscure the presence of this morpheme on the surface. Macaulay's analysis explains why all non-verbal predicates take h-initial allomorphs of the suffixal/enclitic tense and aspect markers, something that Bright must stipulate. To account for the lack of agreement on verbs derived in this manner, she appeals to semantics (p. 176-8), specifically that agreement is absent due to such clauses having an equative meaning.
In the talk, I explicate what Macaulay's claim amounts to in the terms of Stassen's typology of intransitive predication and evaluate it against a body of examples drawn from published texts and from original field work. I conclude that it is largely supported, though it leaves some data unexplained. In the final part of the talk I consider two ways of accomodating the recalcitrant data, while preserving the gains of Macaulay's analysis.
References:
Bright, William (1957) The Karok Language. University of California Publications in Linguistics. Bind 13. CA: University of California Press.
Macaulay, Monica (1989) A Suffixal Analysis of the Karok `Endoclitic'. Lingua 78:159—180.
Stassen, Leon (1997) Intransitive Predication. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
March 20, 2012
Group in American Indian Languages
Sierra Miwok Dialect Geography
Hannah Haynie (University of California, Berkeley)
The Sierra Miwok languages spoken along the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada are traditionally treated as a subgroup of Eastern Miwok comprised of three primary languages/dialects. In this talk I describe a somewhat more complex Sierra Miwok dialect network that is evident in early twentieth century documentation. In examining these dialects I pay special attention to the role of inter-dialect contact in shaping the Sierra Miwok dialect continuum. I propose that both cultural factors and physical geography have influenced the development of the Sierra Miwok dialects, and briefly discuss the use of quantitative tools and geographic models in investigating the relationships between linguistic patterns and extra-linguistic factors.
November 29, 2011
Group in American Indian Languages
Balancing Synchrony and Diachrony in a Polysynthetic Language
Wallace Chafe (University of California, Santa Barbara)
The Northern Iroquoian language Seneca is highly polysynthetic and highly fusional, two properties that challenge traditional methods of both description and pedagogy. Explaining the shape of Seneca words calls for the reconstruction of earlier stages of the language before numerous sound changes took place. I illustrate problems this situation creates for the construction of dictionaries, grammars, and texts, as well as for the design of teaching materials, and I suggest ways of dealing with them. I speculate on how fluent speakers of the language are able to do what they do, and I add a few remarks on what a language of this kind shows us more generally about language and the mind.
October 25, 2011
Group in American Indian Languages
Verbal Person Markers as Pronouns in Matsigenka (Arawak)
Lev Michael (University of California, Berkeley)
Verbal person markers have long presented a puzzle for linguists concerned with the morphosyntax of head-marking languages. These markers have been variously analyzed as 'incorporated pronouns' (Baker 1996, Jelinek 1984), agreement markers (Evans 1999, 2003), or hybrid elements that exhibit properties of both pronouns and agreement markers (Corbett 2006, Mithun 2003, van Gijn 2011).
In this talk I examine the semantic and morphosyntactic properties of verbal person markers in Matsigenka, a Peruvian Arawak language, and argue that a 'syntactic' analysis of these elements, in the spirit of Bresnan (2001), is most successful at characterizing their properties. This analysis has much in common with the emerging consensus that verbal person markers in head-marking languages are best treated as hybrid elements, but diverges from the position of, say, Mithun (2003), in that I argue that the 'pronominal' vs. 'agreement' properties of verbal person markers are partially dependent on the syntactic environments in which they appear. In particular, I argue that an analysis of alternations between a variety of construction types in Matsigenka (including basic active declarative, passive, habitual anti-passive, focus, and object marker elision constructions) suggests that the choice between these constructions is motivated by a desire to make verbal person markers as pronominal as possible. In certain morphosyntactic contexts, however, alternations between constructions are highly restricted, with the result that verbal person markers exhibit properties more characteristic of agreement markers.
September 27, 2011
Group in American Indian Languages
The Group in American Indian Languages (GAIL) invites everyone to our first meeting of the 2011-2012 school year. GAIL gathers once a month on Tuesday nights to discuss ongoing research on the languages of North, Central, and South America. At 6, there will be a potluck dinner, and attendees are encouraged, but not required, to bring a dish to share. The dinner will be followed by short, informal presentations about people's summer fieldwork. Everyone is welcome to attend, even people who didn't do fieldwork; those who did do fieldwork should consider bringing photos, audio, handouts, or other materials to describe and exemplify their work, although this is certainly not required.