North American Indigenous Languages Research Papers (original) (raw)

Previous work on Inuit has analyzed the morpheme pi as a ‘dummy root’ or ‘empty stem’; a morphological or phonological filler which satisfies a language-specific requirement that words contain lexical roots. We argue instead that pi is a pro-form similar to English ‘do so’ and ‘one’. As evidence for this analysis we examine the use of pi to avoid repeating constituents, its ability to replace VP-sized constituents, the need for discourse markers in some constructions containing pi, similarities with ‘stem ellipsis’ in Arctic Quebec Inuktitut, and pi’s behaviour in noun-incorporation.

- by Richard J Compton
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- Languages, Languages and Linguistics, Indigenous Languages, Syntax

Native people were discerning in establishing, revisiting, and occupying familiar places in their homelands. For thousands of years, Den Rock was a focus within the broader indigenous social and geographic landscape. The Den Rock area adjoins the Shawsheen River, in the lower Merrimack River drainage, a region that has been historically and contemporarily occupied by Native peoples. The mutually profound effects of Colonial encounters and settlement, and Native negotiations for continuance and survivance are evident in the historical and contemporary cultural geography of the area. Native placemaking at Den Rock was discerned from gathering and interpreting scattered, fragmentary data in publications, archives and curated artifact collections. Documentary and material evidence of Native people in the Den Rock area has been chiefly recorded, collected, preserved, transformed, and transmitted by descendents and compatriots of colonist-settlers, but seemingly recently forgotten beyond a small cadre of local historical and archaeological specialists. As recently as the early to mid-20th century, local stories and formal histories remembered (but mischaracterized) Native tenancy and practices at Den Rock, even remembering the physical evidence of established Native occupation represented in Native-made artifacts found there. Historical memories of long ago, of long-occupied Native places are revived by focused re-attention, supplemented and recast by current regional archaeologies and ethnographies to reestablish factual understandings of Native placemaking at Den Rock. Renewing social memory about the Den Rock area in the 21st century is intended to enhance conscious understanding and to foster appreciation for protection and preservation of the significant historic and archaeological qualities of the conservation land.

After over a century of federal policy antagonistic toward indigenous languages, the government of Canada by the mid-1980s developed programs to financially support community-based indigenous language revitalization efforts. This project investigates the effect of one such program, the Aboriginal Language Initiative. While a number of useful resources have been produced through the ALI, the overall span of the program demonstrates shallow support for communities in need of capacity building. The experiences of local program delivery agents and feedback provided by recipient communities highlight the federal government’s refusal to act in partnership with Indigenous communities. In light of ongoing reforms to the ALI over the last year, the project will also shed light on the dual role required of language activists, to both harness available resources, while resisting regressive policy directions.

North American languages exhibit a variety of agreement systems, including nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive, hierarchical/direct-inverse, and agent-patient patterns, as well as phenomena such as object agreement, inverse number, and omnivorous number. This chapter examines the patterning and exponence of agreement in these languages, including the φ-features tracked by agreement, types of agreement systems and how these systems reflect grammatical alignment, debates about the syntactic status of agreement markers (as genuine agreement or clitics), and the points at which agreement can occur in the clausal spine.

- by Daniel W Hieber and +2
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- Language revitalization, Languages and Linguistics, Endangered Languages, Language Technologies

The languages of Turtle Island (North America) had coexisted and in some ways
affected each other long before the arrival of the Europeans. Starting sometime around
the 1500s Europeans began trading along the East Coast. They introduced a language
contact situation that may have affected the existing languages and trade jargons.
Language families such as Iroquoian or Algonquian are how linguists conceive of the
relatedness of languages.
The newly introduced languages, with their Indo-European family roots and
impoverished inflectional systems, would affect and be affected by the many existing
Algonquian and Iroquoian languages with their highly productive morphology and
agglutinating structure.
Areal influences are how linguists describe when different language families come into
contact. These, and borrowings between languages, such as the large number of
indigenous words adopted and adapted into English and French, are further examples of
linguistic contact at work.
Languages change and sometimes change faster when they come in contact with new
languages and when they are transferred to new environs. Did this happen in Upper
Canada ? If so what can we find out about the process and results and will it help us
understand the process of linguistic change ?
I will attempt to reconstruct some of the linguistic

Kartvelian etymology of North American toponyms as well as North American native vocabularies.

This chapter is a survey of word classes in indigenous North American languages, with the aim of providing an introduction to the study of parts of speech, and of highlighting the unique place and contribution of North American indigenous languages in this research. Section 2 defines lexical vs. grammatical and open vs. closed classes, and how these distinctions are realized in North American languages. Section 3 summarizes the prominent themes in word classes research in North America: 1) at what level a word is categorized (root, stem, or inflected word), 2) whether a given language distinguishes noun and verb, and 3) whether a given language has an adjective category. The chapter concludes that North American languages present serious challenges to the definition and status of word classes in linguistic theory, and that the development of distinct lexical categories in a language is not necessarily a given.

- by Daniel W Hieber
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- Typology, Syntax, Linguistics, Language Typology

La lengua coahuilteca era hablada por un incontable número de personas de diferentes tribus en lo que hoy es la frontera noreste entre Estados Unidos y México. Desafortunadamente, este idioma se terminó extinguiendo con el paso del tiempo, y para la mitad del siglo XIX, ya había desaparecido totalmente. El propósito de este libro es el de hacer la mayor recopilación de información sobre este idioma, con todo lo que sabemos de ella, y dar a conocer esta lengua tan extraña y misteriosa que merece toda nuestra atención, como todas las lenguas habladas y extintas.
The Coahuilteco language was spoken by an uncountable number of people from different tribes in what is now the northeast border between the United States and Mexico. Unfortunately, this language ended up extinguishing over time, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, it had already completely disappeared. The purpose of this book is to make the greatest collection of information about this language, with everything we know about it, and publicize this strange and mysterious language that deserves all our attention, like all the spoken and extinct languages.

- by Guillaume Jacques
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- Languages and Linguistics, Syntax, Morphosyntax, Morphology

In this paper, I outline the challenges and opportunities of doing collaborative research on Michif, the Cree-French mixed language of the Metis. Michif is critically endangered and pockets of speakers are far apart in small communities within the Metis homeland. In this paper, I present the Michif languages and the Metis people, providing up-to-date assessment of the vitality of the mixed variety of Michif, with detailed information on the numbers of speakers and their location. Also, I provide an account of the activities, past or present, to better describe and revitalize Michif, highlighting community members’ own role in this work. The revitalization efforts have produced some young adult second language speakers, especially in the context of the Mentor-Apprentice programs run for several years by Rita Flamand and Grace (Ledoux) Zoldy in Camperville. My research project aims to continue this collaborative work by running similar programs in Brandon (southern Manitoba). My research project involves a combination of theoretical, descriptive, and revitalization efforts. I will address issues related to the methodology of data collection when working with a polysynthetic, oral, under-described, and severely endangered language. In fact, part of my work will concentrate on the development of an adequate methodology of elicitation aimed at assessing morphological knowledge and representation in older, multilingual speakers who have never written in their language.

- by Maria Mazzoli
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- Indigenous Languages, Metis Studies, Language Documentation, Endangered Languages

Allocutivity is a term coined to describe a phenomenon in Basque whereby, in certain pragmatic (and syntactic) circumstances, an addressee who is not an argument of the verb is systematically encoded in all declarative main clause conjugated verb forms. Although the term is applied exclusively to Basque, similar phenomena are found in other languages as well. Indeed, despite certain differences in the degree of grammaticalization and usage, allocutive verb forms are attested in at least Pumé (isolate; Venezuela), Nambikwara (isolate; Brazil), Mandan (Siouan; North America) and Beja (Cushitic; NE Africa). e aim of this article is to propose a typology of verbal allocutivity in a crosslinguistic perspective, taking into consideration the locus of encoding, the manner in which it is encoded, the information concerning the addressee which is encoded and the syntactic environments in which it can appear.

- by Anton Antonov
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- Languages and Linguistics, Pragmatics, Japanese Linguistics, Syntax

Numerals vary extensively across the world’s languages, ranging from no precise numeral terms to practically infinite limits. Particularly of interest is the category of “small” or low-limit numeral systems; these are often associated with hunter-gatherer groups, but this connection has not yet been demonstrated by a systematic study. Here we present the results of a wide-scale survey of hunter-gatherer numerals. We compare these to agriculturalist languages in the same regions, and consider them against the broader typological backdrop of contemporary numeral systems in the world’s languages. We find that correlations with subsistence pattern are relatively weak, but that numeral trends are clearly areal.

- by Patience Epps and +2
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- Australian Indigenous languages, Endangered Languages, Linguistics, South American indigenous languages

Inuktitut belongs to the Inuit sub-branch of the Eskimo-Aleut language family and is spoken in the Canadian Arctic. Inuktitut is part of a dialect continuum extending across the Arctic from Alaskan Inupiaq in the west to Greenlandic dialects in the east. Although the term ‘Inuit’ is typically used to refer to the Inuit people, it is also used in the literature to refer to the dialect continuum as a whole. Though much of the description of evaluatives below will extend to all of Inuit, it will focus primarily on data from the South Baffin subdialect of Inuktitut.

- by Richard J Compton
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- Indigenous Languages, Syntax, Morphosyntax, Morphology

Indigenous languages are threatened across the world, and the Native American languages of the United States are no exception. With a long history of maltreatment by the United States government, especially by residential schools, many languages have been lost and for many others intergenerational transmission was interrupted in only a number of years. Whether indigenous languages are seen as rights, the culminations of cultural history, or unique “species” that make up the greater linugodiversity of the planet, it is clear that these vanishing voices are a part of a third extinction crisis, and that the endangered languages of the United States need to be kept from disappearing. It is a race against time, but there is plenty of hope—if we would only just do it! Given the current state of the linguistic diversity of North America, it is clear that both documentation and revitalization are necessary processes. As much must be salvaged as possible, and what is gotten from that can be augmented and passed on. Languages, whether seen as gifts from the Creator, fading facets of the human experience, or means of preventing drug abuse and delinquent behavior in Native American youths, are worth the effort of revitalizing. Such efforts should be done in ways that are as authentic as possible, but worries about authenticity should not halt revitalization efforts. There are numerous ways to create vocabulary, use the languages, and teach them as authentically as possible. Both schools and communities must work together if language goals are to be realized, and this is certainly happening in such places as Sitka, AK; Oneida, NY; Minnesota; and Montana.

- by Scott DeLancey
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- North American Indigenous Languages, Penutian, Bipartite Stems

Many conflicting views and debates exist within the field of North American archaeology, one of the most pressing being the possibility of direct contact between populations of Mesoamerica and hunter-gatherer groups of the North American Southwest. This paper summarizes and analyzes multiple lines of evidence indicating the definite possibility of a direct contact event, focusing on linguistic, archaeological, and agricultural similarities between these regional groups.

This paper presents a novel methodology for investigating wordhood and the morphology-syntax divide by looking at the likelihood of convergence between constituency tests. We apply this methodology to 9 languages of the Americas, all from different families. We argue that the data show that languages vary in terms of whether the word is a motivated structural level and the degree to which the word is a motivated structural level.

- by Adam J R Tallman and +3
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- Philosophy of Science, Syntax, Morphosyntax, Morphology

A lack of ancient written records is no impediment to establishing genetic relationships between languages at great time depths. While scholars like Sapir (1929) have proposed genetic groupings based on particular lexical similarities, other scholars have utilized a multifaceted approach to arguing for relatedness by comparing both lexical items and morphological material, given the fact that the latter is less prone to change over time than the former (Goddard 1975; Vajda 2010). This paper assesses Rankin's (1996; 1998) earlier analysis of the plausibility of a relation from common descent between Siouan-Catawban and Yuchi, which is currently considered by most an isolate. By comparing cognates and establishing possible sound correspondences, and by examining the peculiarity of the verbal template with respect to the placement of the first person plural marker vis-à-vis the preverb and verb, and the use of nasal ablaut in Yuchi to mark future tense that is similar to iŋ-ablaut in Dakotan languages, this paper builds upon Rankin's original case for a genetic link between Yuchi and Siouan-Catawban. While more constrained in scope than Chafe's (1976) Macro-Siouan proposal, this paper adds to the body of support for Siouan-Catawban and Yuchi sharing a common ancestor.

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.

- by Richard J Compton
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- Indigenous Languages, Syntax, Morphosyntax, Word-Formation

This article proposes an idealized model of direct-inverse systems inspired by canonical morphology, against which attested systems are then evaluated in terms of their deviation from it. A language-independent definition of obviation is provided, and then applied to language families other than Algonquian. Referential hierarchies are shown not to be the only way of accounting for direct-inverse systems. Finally, the article surveys the attested origins of inverse systems and the ways in which they can be further reanalyzed, ultimately leading to their decay.

- by Anton Antonov and +1
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- Languages and Linguistics, Japanese Linguistics, Syntax, Morphology
- by Tom Kamusella
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- History, Native American Studies, Language Planning and Policy, Race and Ethnicity

These are the slides from my SSILA presentation. Comments / Questions are very welcome!

- by Shahar Shirtz
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- Functional Linguistics, Usage-based Grammar, Argument Structure, Penutian Languages

This paper offers a preliminary analysis of the learner variety of an adult learner of Chickasaw, a Muskogean language spoken today by around 65 fluent first language elders in Oklahoma. Since 2007, Chickasaw Nation has had a Master-Apprentice program, using the model created by linguist Leanne Hinton and the Native California Network in 1992 (Hinton 1997; 2001; 2008; 2011; Hinton et al. 2002). The Master-Apprentice program pairs elder fluent speakers (masters) with young adult learners (apprentices), who learn the language by doing and discussing everyday tasks together. The Master-Apprentice (M-A) pairs speak Chickasaw for two hours a day, five days a week. The goal of the program is to produce competent adult second-language speakers of Chickasaw who will go on to teach the language to future generations. The Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program (CLRP) requires that the apprentices make, at minimum, monthly recordings of their sessions with their masters and deposit these recordings with the CLRP. Using the CLRP's Master-Apprentice recordings, this paper analyzes the learner variety of one of the apprentices during their first year in the program. The paper focuses on the apprentice's usage of verbal morphology, specifically pronominal affixes, tense-aspect and modal suffixes, and negative constructions.

This paper discusses the classification of position of polar question particles in the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) (Dryer 2013c). The most frequent value in the languages surveyed is that of having ‘No Question Particles’. Furthermore, if we compound the Position of Question Particle typology with basic word order typology (Dryer 2013a), we find that the most frequently occurring pair is S(ubject)O(bject)V(erb)/No Question Particle. However, if one looks to the chapter on marking of Polar Questions (Dryer 2013b), many of these languages are classified as not having question particles because their interrogative morpheme is viewed as a verbal affix instead of a question particle. This paper explores the grammars of these cited languages to confirm the status of their interrogative morphemes, beginning with a deeper analysis of Tunica (Haas 1941), a reawakening language isolate of Louisiana. We find that question particles are more common than Dryer has indicated.

This paper examines the semantics of adjectives in Inuit, with particular emphasis on Eastern Canadian Inuktitut. Although traditionally the literature on Eskimo-Aleut languages has not recognized a separate category of adjectives, this paper begins by briefly presenting evidence for two classes of adjectives in Inuit dialects: a set of strictly-attributive suffixal adjectives and a set of verb-like adjectives. Next, having laid out the syntactic evidence for recognizing adjectives as a syntactic category, we turn our attention to the semantic properties of these adjectives. While we might expect the semantic denotations of the members of both sets of adjectives to be similar in nature, it is shown that there is a semantic constraint on the suffixal class of adjectives whereby this set lacks members with intersective denotations. Two possible explanations for this constraint are outlined: a lack of Predicate Modification in the language and nouns being of type or entities.

- by Richard J Compton
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- Languages and Linguistics, Semantics, Indigenous Languages, Syntax

This is my 2015 "mémoire de M1" (thesis for the 1st year of MA).
It presents the verbal system of a North-American Indigenous language called “Omaha” or “Omaha-Ponca”, which is severly endangered. The first part presents elements of the language family and ethnographical researches on the Omaha and Ponca tribes, what material is available and the general typology of the language. The second part focuses on the regular paradigms of the verbal system. The verbal system of Omaha has different personal morphemes for agent and patient, which are all prefixed to the radical. It also has a serie of 5 applicative prefixes which can be added to the verb and change its meaning. The core question of this work is : how is the regular paradigm affected by the addition of applicative prefixes, in morphophonological and semantic levels? For each applicative, a morphophonological description of the paradigms is given, with two person indexation tables and a template. This analysis is based on an unpublished paper by John Koontz, in which nearly all the Omaha verbal paradigms are listed and some explanations provided. Moreover, examples of sentences are given for each paradigm, from Dorsey's corpus of 1890.
At the semantic level, a lot a similarities can be found with the Lakhota applicatives “a-”, “i-”, “o-”, though in both languages there are numerous examples where the applicative signification cannot be singled out from the verb.
At a morphophonologic level, a decomposition of the changes is provided, but some uncertainties remain concerning certain changes, and various counter-examples to those rules can be found in the corpus. The paradigm with “u-” applicative is particulary complicated to understand and is worth further investigation.

Language revitalization can seem like a low priority when considered in the context of a myriad of other concerns that individuals, communities, and governments face on a daily basis; from illness to finding and keeping a job, crumbling infrastructure to environmental crisis (Fishman 1991, 2). Indigenous communities with limited financial resources face the same, if not greater pressure due to the economic and political constraints imposed on them by settler societies (Grenoble & Whaley 2006, 44). Yet the fate of indigenous languages and indigenous economies are connected in subtle ways in settler colonies such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and most of the Americas. This paper explores the interconnections between language maintenance and revitalization and access to land, resources, and economic means of production and subsistence.

- by Scott DeLancey
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- Penutian Languages, North American Indigenous Languages, Penutian

The aim of this paper is to provide a more accurate typological classification of Modern Greek. The verb in MG shows many polysynthetic traits, such as noun and adverb incorporation into the verbal complex, a large inventory of bound morphemes, pronominal marking of objects, many potential slots before the verbal head, nonconfigurational syntax, etc. On the basis of these traits, MG has similarities with polysynthetic languages such as Abkhaz, Cayuga, Chukchi, Mohawk, Nahuatl, a.o. I will show that the abundance of similar patterns between MG and polysynthesis point to the evolution of a new system away from the traditional dependent-marking strategy and simple synthesis towards head-marking and polysynthesis. Finally, I will point to the risk of undertaking a direct comparison of different language systems by discussing the pronominal head-marking strategies in MG and the North American languages.

This paper provides a first account of prosodic structure and the correspondence between prosodic and morphosyntactic constituents in South Baffin Inuktitut. Analyzing scripted dialogues between two speakers, we found that or-thographic words were consistently marked by an f0 fall, while some prosodic variation occurred in utterance-final position. We propose that our intonational analysis shows evidence for two prosodic units: a smaller one corresponding to orthographic words, termed 'prosodic word' here, and a larger one delimited by pauses, identified as the intonational phrase. These two prosodic units exhibit remarkable regularity with respect to their tonal marking, with words regularly being marked by HL tones and intonational phrases mostly being demarcated by an additional L tone. This finding suggests that there is a robust prosodic correlate for the notion of " wordhood " in Inuktitut: orthographic words, whether or not they exhibit polysynthetic properties such as noun incorporation, behave uniformly with respect to their prosodic demarcation.

- by Anja Arnhold and +1
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- Phonology, Speech Prosody, Indigenous Languages, Intonation

This presentation describes the synthetic status of Panoan languages of Amazonia first with respect to one another, and then to some languages of North America. The basic conclusion is that word-formation typology needs to be pay closer attention to how robust the word-phrase division in so-called "polysynthetic" languages, since this is a parameter of variation

Verbs in the Tohono O’odham language (a member of the Uto-Aztecan language family) distinguish two aspects, perfective and imperfective. Most descriptions of Tohono O’odham consider the (usually longer) imperfective form as basic, and the (usually shorter) perfective form as derived through a truncation process, e.g. ñeok (ipf) ~ ñeo (pf) ‘speak’, ñeid (ipf) ∼ ñei (pf) ‘see’, da’icud (ipf) ∼ da’ic (pf) ‘throw’. Competing analyses, in which the perfective form is basic and the imperfective form is derived through suffixation, have been proposed in the literature before, but the lack of clear and separable semantic content in the ‘suffix’ makes supporting such an analysis difficult. In this talk, I use data from a small Tohono O’odham corpus to propose a functional analysis of aspectual marking, in which the perfective form is basic and the imperfective form is derived via the addition of a suffix, which not only indicates imperfective meaning but also serves to classify the verb according to lexical characteristics. In so doing I draw parallels between the morphology of aspect in Tohono O’odham and in Russian, in which a similar classifying function has been claimed.

- by Matt Menzenski
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- Semantics, Linguistics, Slavic Linguistics, Linguistic Typology

This chapter examines adverb ordering within polysynthetic words in Inuit to shed light on the formation of these words. I argue that this adverb -ordering data poses a challenge to the ‘standard’ account of the Mirror Principle (Baker 1985, 1988b) whereby these complex words are derived via head movement, particularly if other common assumptions regarding antisymmetry (Kayne 1994) and adverb licensing (Cinque 1999) are maintained. Instead, I propose that the variable ordering of these adjuncts is expected if the words containing them are right-headed XPs, following arguments for the existence of right-headed structures by Abels and Neeleman (2012), XP-sized words by Compton and Pittman (2012), and in favour of semantically based licensing of adjuncts by Ernst (2002).

- by Richard J Compton
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- Indigenous Languages, Syntax, Morphosyntax, Morphology