Martin Renard | University of Toronto (original) (raw)
Papers by Martin Renard
Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, 2023
Serial verb constructions (SVCs), that is sequences of several consecutive verbs sharing certain ... more Serial verb constructions (SVCs), that is sequences of several consecutive verbs sharing certain features, form a well-established concept in descriptive and comparative syntax. However, there is no consensus concerning a systematic and universal definition of these constructions, leading authors like Bisang (2009) and Haspelmath (2016) to propose explicit criteria for their identification. Although Bantu languages are rarely described as containing SVCs, Tshiluba exhibits constructions that look suspiciously similar to them. This work therefore addresses two questions: (a) are these constructions SVCs in either Bisang's (2009) or Haspelmath's (2016) sense?; and (b) what are their key properties? Using various elicitation methods, I collected data indicating that these Tshiluba constructions conform to those definitions, and exhibit many properties which are usually associated with SVCs. Despite this evidence, further complications mean that these constructions remain ambiguous between serialization and asyndetic coordination, suggesting that we may be dealing with an ongoing shift between the two (Andrason 2018), although further empirical confirmation is needed.
Journal of the Undergraduate Linguistics Association of Britain, 2022
In this work, I investigate a case study of language revitalisation involving the adult immersion... more In this work, I investigate a case study of language revitalisation involving the adult immersion school Onkwawén:na Kentyóhkwa (OK), which is located in Ohswé:ken along the Grand River (Ontario), and where the Northern Iroquoian language Kanyen'kéha (Mohawk) has been taught as a second language since 1999. I focus on three major aspects. First, I look at the different arguments that have been proposed in favour of and against language revitalisation, and how they relate to the motivations underlying the OK project. Second, I analyse the challenges involved in teaching a polysynthetic Iroquoian language to native English speakers, especially in terms of morphological complexity and discourse patterns. Third, I present the main strategy that has been implemented by the school to engage with these challenges, a morpheme-based teaching technique called the 'Root Word Method' (RWM), before considering its theoretical implications. I tentatively argue that the paradox between the pedagogical usefulness of the morpheme, as suggested by the success of the RWM, and the fact that L1 speakers probably process some morphological structures in terms of the abstractive approach is illusory, because the pedagogical efficiency of the constructive approach in L2 acquisition is logically independent from the issue of its psychological adequacy in accounting for L1 competence. I conclude by suggesting that these interesting implications of a case study of language revitalisation for significant issues in modern linguistic theory, such as the constructive-abstractive debate in morphology, provide a good example of the value of applied linguistics projects to theoretical linguistics.
Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics, 2021
The modern field of linguistics is ripe with polarising theoretical debates, and perhaps even mor... more The modern field of linguistics is ripe with polarising theoretical debates, and perhaps even more so than other disciplines because of its inherent interdisciplinarity. Nevertheless, once all debated topics are stripped away, there seems to be a residual consensus concerning the core nature of human language. This general agreement arises, it seems, not because one hegemonic theory managed to impose its views, but rather because it concerns a set of basic facts about human language that are true in an absolute and objective sense. Thus, I believe that most (if not all) linguists today would uncontroversially agree with the three statements in (1) below. (1) a. Human language is a biologically-determined physico-cognitive human ability. b. Human language is a form of social behaviour constrained by cultural norms. c. Human language is a structured formal system composed of regular patterns. By accepting these facts, linguists implicitly subscribe to the same view of language as an inherently tripartite entity, constituted of a natural aspect, a cultural aspect, and a structural aspect. It is this implicit view that this squib attempts to make explicit. My hope is that fully spelling out what is (to my mind) such a crucial trichotomy might help gain a clearer picture of linguistic theory and, most importantly, of the nature of human language itself. These three aspects of language are visible in the works of Edward Sapir (1884-1939), one of the founders of modern linguistics and anthropology. Consider the quote below in (2). (2) It is precisely because language is as strictly socialized a type of human behavior as anything else in culture and yet betrays in its outlines and tendencies such regularities as only the natural scientist is in the habit of formulating, that linguistics is of strategic importance for the methodology of social science. (Sapir 1929: 213) The message here is clear. For Sapir, language is simultaneously a type of sociocultural behaviour, and a highly regular product of the human mind. Crucially, ©2021 Renard This is an open-access article distributed by Section of Theoretical & Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge under the terms of a Creative Commons Non-Commercial License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0).
Thesis Chapters by Martin Renard
MPhil Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2021
The question of potential mutual influences between language and culture, defined as "worldview",... more The question of potential mutual influences between language and culture, defined as "worldview", has been central in Western linguistic thought since at least the 17 th century, especially through the debates between universalism and essentialism. Arguably, the Boasian approach, laid out in the works of Boas, Sapir, and Whorf in the first half of the 20 th century, constitutes an attempt to escape this dichotomy by recognising both the universal aspect of human cognition, and the intimate relationship between language and culture. The "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" which emerged from this latter insight has subsequently been taken in different directions by ethnolinguists and psycholinguists alike, as the debate surrounding linguistic relativity rages on. What unites all such frameworks, however, is an unspoken commitment to approaching the language-culture nexus exclusively from the etic viewpoint of external observers. Based on data from the endangered Northern Iroquoian language Kanyen'kéha (Mohawk), the present study attempts to show that this perspective is necessary, but not sufficient, to fully understand this phenomenon, as speakers themselves can also create emic language-culture links from their internal standpoint as community-members, something which has been largely ignored in the literature. That will motivate upgrading this classical "Single-Perspective Theory" of the language-culture nexus to the novel "Dual-Perspective Theory" which I propose in this work, partly based on pre-existing ideas drawn primarily from the field of language ideology. Although the creation of these emic links may be restricted to contexts in which language is politicised and the language-culture nexus is "consciousised", such as L2 revitalisation, I argue that it calls for a broadening of our conception of the language-culture nexus: it is not only a matter of long-term diachronic and subconscious mutual influences between them, but can also be actively, consciously, synchronically, and spontaneously manipulated by social actors themselves.
Drafts by Martin Renard
Generals Paper, University of Toronto, 2022
; although most of these have been fairly well documented, and reclamation attempts based on arch... more ; although most of these have been fairly well documented, and reclamation attempts based on archival materials have started for some (see for instance Lukaniec's work on Wendat). Within this Northern branch, only Kanien'kéha fares slightly better, as it still retains a substantial number of speakers in certain communities. Kanien'kéha is spoken by the Kanien'kehá:ka people, originally the easternmost nation of the Rotinonhsión:ni (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy, whose traditional territory stretched along the Mohawk River valley in present-day New York State. Due to repeated settler encroachments, the establishment of Jesuit missions, military raids, and forced relocations, especially following the defeat of their British allies in the American Revolutionary War in 1783, most Kanien'kehá:ka left their homeland to settle in Canada (Bonvillain 1992). Kanien'kéha is now spoken in six main communities: Ohswé:ken (Six Nations of the Grand River), Tyendinaga, and Wáhta in Ontario; Kahnawà:ke and Kanehsatà:ke in Quebec (members of these communities also own the small uninhabited hunting and fishing territory of Tioweró:ton); and Akwesáhsne, which straddles the border between these two Canadian provinces and New York State (Mithun 1999:424). From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, small groups from these communities have also (re)settled in the territories of Kanièn:ke and Kana'tsoharè:ke, located in the ancestral Kanien'kehá:ka homeland in upstate New York. With fewer than 700 speakers left, however, Kanien'kéha is obviously endangered as well, and is generally considered "Stage 8" on Fishman's (1991) original Graded Inter-generational Disruption Scale (GIDS); "Moribund" as per Lewis and Simons' (2010) Expanded GIDS (EGIDS); or "Severely Endangered" according to the UNESCO Major Evaluative Factors of Language Vitality and Endangerment (DeCaire 2021): the majority of active speakers of the language belong to the grandparent generation, or are even older. It is important, though, to note that traditional vitality metrics such as GIDS and EGIDS are flawed in a non-trivial way: they only measure the level of attrition of a language, and not its level of revitalization. In the case of Kanien'kéha, for instance, they do not take into account the growing number of highly proficient L2 speakers. On top of systemic socioeconomic pressures to shift to English and / or French, the endangerment of Kanien'kéha was greatly accelerated throughout the 20 th century by the governmentfunded and church-run system of residential and day schools in Canada, and boarding schools in the United States (Bilash 2011), whose explicit objective was the complete assimilation of Indigenous children into mainstream Western society in order to "get rid of the Indian problem" (Duncan Campbell Scott, cited in McDougall 2008). The objective was the destruction of Indigenous languages and cultures, by systematically punishing children for speaking their language (Grant 1996), and, more importantly, by breaking "the link between parent and child, preventing the natural transmission of language and culture to the next generation" (i.e. severing inter-generational transmission) (Bilash 2011:137). The current grandparent generation (i.e. individuals who grew up from the 1920s to the 1940s) were thus the last peer group to be at first largely monolingual in Kanien'kéha (or at least to use it as their primary language). After years in government schools, this generation either lost the language, or understandably did not wish their children to experience the same trauma, and was therefore unable to transmit it, so that the current parent generation generally does not speak the language natively, although the number of L2 speakers is now increasing thanks to revitalization efforts. As their own children now have more opportunities than they did to learn the language (e.g. school language classes or child immersion programs), this parent generation has come to be known as the "lost generation", isolated between the grandparent generation and child generation who speak it, or at least are learning it (Hoover and KORLCC 1992:271).
Term Paper, University of Toronto, 2021
Term Paper, University of Toronto, 2022
Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, 2023
Serial verb constructions (SVCs), that is sequences of several consecutive verbs sharing certain ... more Serial verb constructions (SVCs), that is sequences of several consecutive verbs sharing certain features, form a well-established concept in descriptive and comparative syntax. However, there is no consensus concerning a systematic and universal definition of these constructions, leading authors like Bisang (2009) and Haspelmath (2016) to propose explicit criteria for their identification. Although Bantu languages are rarely described as containing SVCs, Tshiluba exhibits constructions that look suspiciously similar to them. This work therefore addresses two questions: (a) are these constructions SVCs in either Bisang's (2009) or Haspelmath's (2016) sense?; and (b) what are their key properties? Using various elicitation methods, I collected data indicating that these Tshiluba constructions conform to those definitions, and exhibit many properties which are usually associated with SVCs. Despite this evidence, further complications mean that these constructions remain ambiguous between serialization and asyndetic coordination, suggesting that we may be dealing with an ongoing shift between the two (Andrason 2018), although further empirical confirmation is needed.
Journal of the Undergraduate Linguistics Association of Britain, 2022
In this work, I investigate a case study of language revitalisation involving the adult immersion... more In this work, I investigate a case study of language revitalisation involving the adult immersion school Onkwawén:na Kentyóhkwa (OK), which is located in Ohswé:ken along the Grand River (Ontario), and where the Northern Iroquoian language Kanyen'kéha (Mohawk) has been taught as a second language since 1999. I focus on three major aspects. First, I look at the different arguments that have been proposed in favour of and against language revitalisation, and how they relate to the motivations underlying the OK project. Second, I analyse the challenges involved in teaching a polysynthetic Iroquoian language to native English speakers, especially in terms of morphological complexity and discourse patterns. Third, I present the main strategy that has been implemented by the school to engage with these challenges, a morpheme-based teaching technique called the 'Root Word Method' (RWM), before considering its theoretical implications. I tentatively argue that the paradox between the pedagogical usefulness of the morpheme, as suggested by the success of the RWM, and the fact that L1 speakers probably process some morphological structures in terms of the abstractive approach is illusory, because the pedagogical efficiency of the constructive approach in L2 acquisition is logically independent from the issue of its psychological adequacy in accounting for L1 competence. I conclude by suggesting that these interesting implications of a case study of language revitalisation for significant issues in modern linguistic theory, such as the constructive-abstractive debate in morphology, provide a good example of the value of applied linguistics projects to theoretical linguistics.
Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics, 2021
The modern field of linguistics is ripe with polarising theoretical debates, and perhaps even mor... more The modern field of linguistics is ripe with polarising theoretical debates, and perhaps even more so than other disciplines because of its inherent interdisciplinarity. Nevertheless, once all debated topics are stripped away, there seems to be a residual consensus concerning the core nature of human language. This general agreement arises, it seems, not because one hegemonic theory managed to impose its views, but rather because it concerns a set of basic facts about human language that are true in an absolute and objective sense. Thus, I believe that most (if not all) linguists today would uncontroversially agree with the three statements in (1) below. (1) a. Human language is a biologically-determined physico-cognitive human ability. b. Human language is a form of social behaviour constrained by cultural norms. c. Human language is a structured formal system composed of regular patterns. By accepting these facts, linguists implicitly subscribe to the same view of language as an inherently tripartite entity, constituted of a natural aspect, a cultural aspect, and a structural aspect. It is this implicit view that this squib attempts to make explicit. My hope is that fully spelling out what is (to my mind) such a crucial trichotomy might help gain a clearer picture of linguistic theory and, most importantly, of the nature of human language itself. These three aspects of language are visible in the works of Edward Sapir (1884-1939), one of the founders of modern linguistics and anthropology. Consider the quote below in (2). (2) It is precisely because language is as strictly socialized a type of human behavior as anything else in culture and yet betrays in its outlines and tendencies such regularities as only the natural scientist is in the habit of formulating, that linguistics is of strategic importance for the methodology of social science. (Sapir 1929: 213) The message here is clear. For Sapir, language is simultaneously a type of sociocultural behaviour, and a highly regular product of the human mind. Crucially, ©2021 Renard This is an open-access article distributed by Section of Theoretical & Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge under the terms of a Creative Commons Non-Commercial License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0).
MPhil Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2021
The question of potential mutual influences between language and culture, defined as "worldview",... more The question of potential mutual influences between language and culture, defined as "worldview", has been central in Western linguistic thought since at least the 17 th century, especially through the debates between universalism and essentialism. Arguably, the Boasian approach, laid out in the works of Boas, Sapir, and Whorf in the first half of the 20 th century, constitutes an attempt to escape this dichotomy by recognising both the universal aspect of human cognition, and the intimate relationship between language and culture. The "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" which emerged from this latter insight has subsequently been taken in different directions by ethnolinguists and psycholinguists alike, as the debate surrounding linguistic relativity rages on. What unites all such frameworks, however, is an unspoken commitment to approaching the language-culture nexus exclusively from the etic viewpoint of external observers. Based on data from the endangered Northern Iroquoian language Kanyen'kéha (Mohawk), the present study attempts to show that this perspective is necessary, but not sufficient, to fully understand this phenomenon, as speakers themselves can also create emic language-culture links from their internal standpoint as community-members, something which has been largely ignored in the literature. That will motivate upgrading this classical "Single-Perspective Theory" of the language-culture nexus to the novel "Dual-Perspective Theory" which I propose in this work, partly based on pre-existing ideas drawn primarily from the field of language ideology. Although the creation of these emic links may be restricted to contexts in which language is politicised and the language-culture nexus is "consciousised", such as L2 revitalisation, I argue that it calls for a broadening of our conception of the language-culture nexus: it is not only a matter of long-term diachronic and subconscious mutual influences between them, but can also be actively, consciously, synchronically, and spontaneously manipulated by social actors themselves.
Generals Paper, University of Toronto, 2022
; although most of these have been fairly well documented, and reclamation attempts based on arch... more ; although most of these have been fairly well documented, and reclamation attempts based on archival materials have started for some (see for instance Lukaniec's work on Wendat). Within this Northern branch, only Kanien'kéha fares slightly better, as it still retains a substantial number of speakers in certain communities. Kanien'kéha is spoken by the Kanien'kehá:ka people, originally the easternmost nation of the Rotinonhsión:ni (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy, whose traditional territory stretched along the Mohawk River valley in present-day New York State. Due to repeated settler encroachments, the establishment of Jesuit missions, military raids, and forced relocations, especially following the defeat of their British allies in the American Revolutionary War in 1783, most Kanien'kehá:ka left their homeland to settle in Canada (Bonvillain 1992). Kanien'kéha is now spoken in six main communities: Ohswé:ken (Six Nations of the Grand River), Tyendinaga, and Wáhta in Ontario; Kahnawà:ke and Kanehsatà:ke in Quebec (members of these communities also own the small uninhabited hunting and fishing territory of Tioweró:ton); and Akwesáhsne, which straddles the border between these two Canadian provinces and New York State (Mithun 1999:424). From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, small groups from these communities have also (re)settled in the territories of Kanièn:ke and Kana'tsoharè:ke, located in the ancestral Kanien'kehá:ka homeland in upstate New York. With fewer than 700 speakers left, however, Kanien'kéha is obviously endangered as well, and is generally considered "Stage 8" on Fishman's (1991) original Graded Inter-generational Disruption Scale (GIDS); "Moribund" as per Lewis and Simons' (2010) Expanded GIDS (EGIDS); or "Severely Endangered" according to the UNESCO Major Evaluative Factors of Language Vitality and Endangerment (DeCaire 2021): the majority of active speakers of the language belong to the grandparent generation, or are even older. It is important, though, to note that traditional vitality metrics such as GIDS and EGIDS are flawed in a non-trivial way: they only measure the level of attrition of a language, and not its level of revitalization. In the case of Kanien'kéha, for instance, they do not take into account the growing number of highly proficient L2 speakers. On top of systemic socioeconomic pressures to shift to English and / or French, the endangerment of Kanien'kéha was greatly accelerated throughout the 20 th century by the governmentfunded and church-run system of residential and day schools in Canada, and boarding schools in the United States (Bilash 2011), whose explicit objective was the complete assimilation of Indigenous children into mainstream Western society in order to "get rid of the Indian problem" (Duncan Campbell Scott, cited in McDougall 2008). The objective was the destruction of Indigenous languages and cultures, by systematically punishing children for speaking their language (Grant 1996), and, more importantly, by breaking "the link between parent and child, preventing the natural transmission of language and culture to the next generation" (i.e. severing inter-generational transmission) (Bilash 2011:137). The current grandparent generation (i.e. individuals who grew up from the 1920s to the 1940s) were thus the last peer group to be at first largely monolingual in Kanien'kéha (or at least to use it as their primary language). After years in government schools, this generation either lost the language, or understandably did not wish their children to experience the same trauma, and was therefore unable to transmit it, so that the current parent generation generally does not speak the language natively, although the number of L2 speakers is now increasing thanks to revitalization efforts. As their own children now have more opportunities than they did to learn the language (e.g. school language classes or child immersion programs), this parent generation has come to be known as the "lost generation", isolated between the grandparent generation and child generation who speak it, or at least are learning it (Hoover and KORLCC 1992:271).
Term Paper, University of Toronto, 2021
Term Paper, University of Toronto, 2022