Complex verb formation in Eskimo (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Morphology in the Muskogean languages
Morphology in the Muskogean Languages, 2016
The indigenous languages of the Americas exemplify a number of uncommon typological patterns, especially in their morphology. Here, that rich morphology is illustrated via the Muskogean languages of the southeastern United States. Muskogean languages are agglutinative, but even more interesting and uncommon patterns emerge in an analysis of their morphology. These include subtractive morphology, suppletion, infixation, ablaut, and the use of suprasegmentals. These morphological patterns present considerable complexity. Inflected verbs in narratives and conversation often reflect more than one of the morphological processes. This morphological complexity also demonstrates characteristics of being nonlinear, of being prosodic yet not aligning with neat prosodic boundaries, of not having direct correspondence between grammatical categories and surface segments or suprasegmentals, or having more than one of those characteristics. Six of the seven Muskogean languages are still currently spoken by fluent first language speakers, and many of the tribal nations who represent these languages are involved in ongoing documentation and revitalization efforts, often in partnership with linguists. Thus, despite their highly endangered status, excellent existing documentation and new questions in research create an opportunity to collect even more intricate inflected forms that will enrich models of morphology and morphological theory while having broader impacts, like supporting tribal language revitalization.
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.
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.
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.
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
Word-formation by phase in Inuit (pre-print version, Lingua 120:9, 2010)
Lingua, 2010
This paper argues that wordhood in the polysynthetic Inuit language is predictable from syntactic structure and that words correspond to the domains of CP and DP. This entails that Inuit’s morphological component need not be any more complex than that of more isolating languages and that individual morphemes are not idiosyncratically specified as affixes. As evidence for our approach, we contrast a variety of free and bound elements, showing that in every case, subparts of words are smaller than CP/DP and full words correspond to CP/DP. We also discuss “stem” ellipsis, which we argue is further evidence that the elements which are usually bound in Inuit are not genuinely affixes.
This thesis explores the properties of adjectives and adverbs in Inuit (Eskimo-Aleut), with focus on the Inuktitut dialect group. While the literature on Eskimoan languages has claimed that they lack these categories, I present syntactic evidence for two classes of adjectives, one verb-like and another strictly attributive, as well as a class of adverbs. These categories are then employed to diagnose more general properties of the language including headedness, word-formation, adjunct licensing, and semantic composition. In the first half of Chapter 2 I demonstrate that verb-like adjectives can be differentiated from verbs insofar as only the former are compatible with a particular copular construction involving modals. Similarly, verb-like adjectives can combine with a negative marker that is incompatible with genuine verbs. This contrast is further corroborated by an inflectional distinction between verb-like adjectives and verbs in the Siglitun dialect. A second class of strictly-attributive adjectives is argued for on the basis of stacking, variable order, optionality, and compositionality. The second half of the chapter examines semantic restrictions on membership in the strictly-attributive class whereby only adjectives with subsective and privative denotations are attested. These restrictions are explained by the proposal that Inuit lacks a rule of Predicate Modification, with the result that only adjectives with semantic types capable of composing with nouns via Functional Application can compose directly with nominals. Furthermore, to explain why this restriction does not extend to verb-like adjectives it is proposed that when these modify nominals, they are adjoined DP appositives and compose via Potts’s (2005) rule of Conventional Implicature Application. In Chapter 3 I argue for a class of adverbs, presenting evidence including degree modification, variable ordering, speaker-oriented meanings, and the ability to modify additional categories. Finally, data from adverb ordering is used to compare syntactically oriented and semantically oriented approaches to adjunct licensing and verbal-complex formation. I present arguments in favour of a right-headed analysis of Inuit in which the relative position of adverbs inside polysynthetic verbal-complexes is primarily determined by semantics, supporting Ernst (2002), contra cartographic approaches such as Cinque (1999).