Morphology in the Muskogean languages (original) (raw)
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Exuberant Complexity: The Interplay of Morphology, Syntax, and Prosody in Central Alaskan Yup'ik
Linguistic Discovery, 2012
Written varieties of many languages show greater syntactic complexity than their spoken counterparts. The difference is not surprising: writers have more time to create elaborate structures than speakers, who must produce speech in a steady stream. As documentation grows of the effects of language contact in the Americas, it is becoming ever clearer that exposure to languages with strong literary traditions has often had a significant impact on syntactic structure. Complexity is, however, not always due to literacy or contact with literacy. Here it is shown that though contact can indeed result in copied markers or replicated categories, it is not a precondition for the development of complexity.
Plains Cree Verbal Derivational Morphology
Papers of the Forty-Eighth Algonquian Conference, 2019
The complex morphosyntax of Plains Cree and related languages has long been the focus of Algonquian research. Verbs in particular offer a wealth of morphological issues to be investigated. For Plains Cree, verbal templates have been constructed containing up to seventeen slots for preverbs and inflectional affixes. For preverbs, up to eight slots are allotted for various functions, which may be either grammatical or inflectional. Derivational templates for Plains Cree verb stems also allow for several layers of secondary derivation and extreme examples of Plains Cree verb stems contain seven or more morphemes (Bakker 2006; Wolfart 1973, 1996; Wolvengrey 2012). Our goal is to investigate the derivational morphological complexity of Plains Cree verbs in actual language use compared to the complexity demonstrated in theoretical templates; furthermore, we consider both lexical preverbs and stem derivational morphemes (i.e., those used in primary and secondary derivation), due to their considerable influence on semantics and lexeme formation, to constitute derivational morphology in the present study. Previous investigations (e.g. Wolvengrey 2015) of Plains Cree have found restrictions on the number of preverbs before disfluencies (false starts, hesitations, etc.) begin to consistently occur; including both grammatical and lexical preverbs, up to five are seen to occur before such disfluencies consistently appear. Thus, when lexical preverbs are combined with extreme examples of secondary derivation, we might expect up to fourteen derivational morphemes in the most complex of verbs. However, cursory corpus searches indicate that this kind of complexity is not the norm in Plains Cree. Herein, we undertake a quantitative corpus investigation of Plains Cree derivational morphology, in which we investigate the overall derivational complexity of Plains Cree verbs and how stem and preverbal morphology co-occur. Some semantic and functional patterns become evident. Additionally, while extreme complexity might in principle be possible in Plains Cree verbs, actual language use demonstrates considerably fewer derivational morphemes than the theoretical maximum. BACKGROUND Plains Cree Plains Cree is a member of the Algonquian language family and the westernmost member of the Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi language continuum, spoken across Canada from Alberta to Labrador. Plains Cree has several thousands of speakers, mostly in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Still spoken and written in many contexts today, such as in online communication, radio and television broadcasts, and published books, Plains Cree offers an excellent opportunity for corpus investigations of a native North American language. The corpus used herein in further discussed in §2.2. While the focus of this paper is derivational morphology, several features common to Algonquian languages are referenced. These include primarily the noun classification system of animacy and verbal classification by animacy and transitivity. The animacy system includes the grammatical categories of animate and inanimate that are pervasive in Plains Cree through pragmatics, semantics, and morphosyntax. Verbs are categorized by the animacy of their participants and by their transitivity, resulting in four
Yupik-Inuit (or Eskimo) languages have one pervasive morphological process, recursive suffixation to a base, and—normally—a corollary scope rule according to which any suffix is an operator or modifier with scope over exactly the base to which it was added. This pattern is both prolific and exclusive: there is (almost) no prefixation, no mutation, ablaut, reduplication, nor any base-base or (practi- cally any) word-word compounding. Moreover the pattern has apparently been historically persistent, since it dominates all known members of Yupik-Inuit and more distantly-related Aleut as well. Taking this morphological ‘straitjacket’ as its starting point, this paper explores violations of the corollary scope rule. My point is that these scopal violations are determined by the grammatical or semantic content of individual suffixes, in keeping with the behavior associated with that content in languages with more heterodox morphology and syntax. In effect, then, the language family’s orthodox morphology becomes the ground for a natural experiment, allowing us to diagnose independent and perhaps universal structural proclivities of certain common lexico-grammatical functions.
Linguistic Discovery 10.1
Written varieties of many languages show greater syntactic complexity than their spoken counterparts. The difference is not surprising: writers have more time to create elaborate structures than speakers, who must produce speech in a steady stream. As documentation grows of the effects of language contact in the Americas, it is becoming ever clearer that exposure to languages with strong literary traditions has often had a significant impact on syntactic structure. Complexity is, however, not always due to literacy or contact with literacy. Here it is shown that though contact can indeed result in copied markers or replicated categories, it is not a precondition for the development of complexity.
Phonological Issues in North Alaskan Inupiaq. Alaska Native Language Center Research Papers No. 6
1981
Regressive assimilation in Barrow 39 2.21 At morpheme boundaries 39 2.22 Morpheme-internal assimilation 42. 2.3 Regressive assimilation in Kobuk 43 2.31 Failure of assimilation before cluster-initial suffixes 45 2.32 Failure of assimilation conditioned by syncope 50 2.33 Additional suffixes before which assimilation fails 55 2.4 Progressive assimilation 57 2.5 Collapsing the assimilation rules 59 2.6 Assimilation preceding enclitics 62 2.7 Assimilation in the subordinative verb mood 65 2.8 Assimilatory changes in point of articulation 69 2.81 The case of nigig 70 2.82 Other cases 73 3 Assibilation and Palatalization 76 3.1 Introduction 76 3.2 Palatalization in Barrow 79 3.21 Palatalization following verb stems. 79 3.22 Palatalization following noun stems. 82 3.23 A synchronic approach to palatalization 83 3.24 The palatalization rule 85 3.25 Non-alternating palatals 87 3.251 i preceding non-coronals. .. 87 3.252 Accounting for non-alternating palatals 88 5 5.23 Lenition 171 5.24 Alternation involving s and y 176 5.25 Alternation involving t 180 5.3
This is a sketch of polysynthesis in Central Alaskan Yupik (CAY) based on the Cup'ik dialect of Chevak, Alaska. CAY has well-defined words whose content is often holophrastic and whose parts are often word-like. Holophrasis is achieved by a combination of rich inflectional suffixation and by a derivational morphology in which several hundred productive suffixes bearing different lexical and grammatical meanings and functions may be added, recursively, to a lexical base. Each suffix selects the category of its base, over which it normally has scope, and determines the category of the resultant base. This simple but prolific suffixation-based system, termed 'morphological orthodoxy', yields long, polysynthetic words. Three cases are then discussed where suffixal elements govern constructions that in one way or another stretch CAY's orthodox morphology, motivating them by showing parallel constructions governed by elements with similar grammatical and semantic content in languages with more heterodox morphology and syntax.
Complex verb formation in Eskimo
Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 1985
COMPLEX VERB FORMATION IN ESKIMO* * This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under grants IST 81-20403 to Brandeis University and BNS 80-14730 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to the first author. We would like to thank J. Sadock, L. Smith and A. Woodbury for their perceptive and extensive comments on an earlier version of this paper. Two anonymous reviewers provided useful criticisms and suggestions. 1 Absolutive case has no overt marker. The realization of ergative case is governed by complex morphological and phonological rules which we will ignore. See Woodbury (1981) for a treatment of the phonology and morphology of the related Central Yup'ik language.
Events in Inuktitut: Voice alternations and viewpoint aspect In this paper, I offer an analysis of the aspectual readings of the Antipassive (AP) construction in Inuktitut. It provides new evidence that it is not only the AP construction per se that yields an atelic interpretation but shows several factors that interact to render the AP construction atelic. 1) The verb’s argument structure and Aktionsart determine the distribution of AP morphology on the verb. 2) The AP morpheme is responsible for telicity. The AP construction in Inuktitut differs from the ergative construction in the following properties: The verb shows agreement morphology with only the absolutive argument (intransitive agreement) and the lower argument has oblique case (1). In the ergative construction, agreement is with both arguments (transitive agreement) (1). Previous analyses of the AP in Inuit languages have shown that has an atelic interpretation compared to the ergative construction (Benua (1995) for Yup’...