Abstracts

Abstracts

Are Strict Cycle Effects Derivable: An argument, based on Chumash sibilant harmony, against Kiparsky's proposal that Strict Cycle effects are derivable from underspecification. Includes an argument that feature-changing harmony results from distinct delinking and spreading rules, since another rule must intervene.
: As published in Ellen Kaisse and Sharon Hargus (eds.) Lexical Phonology and Morphology San Diego: Academic Press. pp. 315-321. but formatted and paginated differently.
Binary Comparison and the History of Comparative Hokan Studies: A critique of the claim by Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen that comparative study of the Hokan family has suffered from emphasis on binary comparison and that this illustrates the advantage of multilateral comparison over binary comparison.
: As published in International Journal of American Linguistics 61.1.135-144. (1995), but formatted and paginated differently.
Blocking of Phrasal Constructions by Lexical Items: Presents evidence, citing examples from Japanese, English, and Basque, that lexical items can block phrasal constructions. Proposes that this effect is restricted to syntactic constructions that instantiate what in other respects are morphological categories.
: As published in Ivan Sag and Anna Szabolsci (eds.) Lexical Matters, Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information. pp. 111-130. (1992), but formatted and paginated differently.
Carrier Monosyllabic Noun Stems: Athabaskan languages have extremely complex and productive morphology based overwhelmingly on verbal roots. There are very few basic nouns. Monosyllabic noun stems are either unanalyzable, and therefore presumptively old, or, where analyzable, reflect very old derivational processes. It has therefore been suggested that they can provide a window into the deeper layers of culture history. However, this project has not to my knowledge previously been carried out. In this paper I report on an analysis of the monosyllabic noun stems of Carrier, one of the few languages of the region for which really extensive lexical information is available. Approximately 360 monosyllabic noun stems are attested, representing about 10% of those phonotactically possible. A handful, such as "cat" and "berry" are loans (from English and Gitksan respectively), thus demonstrating that monosyllables are not invariably old. In general, the monosyllables do reflect what are probably very old aspects of the culture. By far the most heavily represented semantic fields are anatomical terms and kinship terms; most of the basic terms in these areas are monosyllables. Similarly, much of the terminology for describing the natural world (e.g. island, river, fire, earth, sand) is monosyllabic. The monosyllabic technological terms are suggestive of a cultural emphasis on water and on trapping; in general they reflect a very old layer of technology. Perhaps surprising is the relatively small amount of monosyllabic biological terminology. Even items for which Athabaskan speakers have surely had words for a very long time sometimes are morphologically complex. For example, most dialects of Carrier use a deverbal form for "porcupine", literally meaning "the quilled one".
The Carrier Syllabics: A description of the structure and use of the "syllabic" writing system for Carrier. This paper is short and is devoted mostly to explaining how the system works. A lengthier and more general treatment, including a detailed disucssion of the structure of the system and its history, may be found in Dulkw'ahke: the First Carrier Writing System [Yinka Dene Language Institute Technical Report #1]
Cliticization to NP and Lexical Phonology: Argues on the basis of the Tongan definitive accent that a morpheme may have a syntactic distribution (in this case, it apears at the right edge of the NP, attached to whatever word may appear there) but nonetheless be lexically attached. This situation may be dealt with by generating the forms in the lexicon and checking foot features in the syntax.
: The paper as presented here is a slightly reformatted version (with footnotes rather than endnotes) of the original, which appeared in Michael Wescoat et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the Fourth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (Dept. of Linguistics, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.) (1985) pp. 262-272.
Constraints on Source/Goal Co-Occurrence in Carrier: In Carrier, it is impossible for the source and goal of motion to be specified in the same clause. This constraint applies at the level of argument structure. The constraint results from the fact that Carrier motion verbs have a single directional argument position. This is a goal by default, but may be changed into a source by suitable morphology.
: This is a revised and expanded version of a paper presented at the Winter meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, New York City, 11 January 1998. To appear in The Nature of the Word: Essays in Honor of Paul Kiparsky, edited by Kristin Hanson and Sharon Inkelas, MIT Press.
D-Effect Related Phenomena in Southern Dakelh: A discussion of a variety of phonological phenomena related to the D-Effect in Southern Dakelh (Carrier) dialects, including a case of dialectal variation in rule ordering and the appearance of multiple D-valence prefixes in sequence.
Dating Velar Palatalization in Carrier: Evidence indicates that the palatalization of the velars in Carrier took place between 1793 and 1819.
The Double-O Constraints in Japanese: The Double-O Constraint (Harada 1973), is intended to account for the ungrammaticality of clauses containing two accusative Noun Phrases. It has been discussed by numerous authors in various formulations. This paper attempts to clarify the phenomena involved and to reduce the class of possible analyses. Five main points are made: (a) that there are actually two constraints, the Deep Double-O Constraint, violation of which produces gross ungrammaticality, which is not subject to variation among speakers, and does not require the presence of two surface accusatives, and the Surface Double-O Constraint, violation of which frequently fails to produce outright ungrammaticality, which is subject to considerable variation among speakers, and which arises only when two accusatives are present on the surface. (b) Several formulations of the DDOC are untenable, namely those based on: (i) valency; (ii) surface case; and (iii) thematic roles. (c) The DDOC must be stated on argument structure. (d) there are four classes of accusatives that do not count for the DDOC: (i) path accusatives; (ii) body-part accusatives; (iii) tokoro complements; and (iv) ablatival accusatives. The last are exempt only for a minority of speakers, reflecting a nearly complete historical change. (e) The status of the accusatives that do not trigger the DDOC is unclear. They pass certain putative tests for object status. That is, they may be passivized, and they may float quantifiers. However, neither of these now appears to be a clear test for object status. It is thus possible to treat these accusatives as oblique.
The Double Object Constraint in French is not a Constraint on Thematic Roles: An argument based on the behaviour of idioms against Williams (1981)'s proposal that the double object constraint in French causatives is a constraint on thematic roles.
Dulkw'ahke: the First Carrier Writing System: Carrier, an Athabaskan language of the central interior of British Columbia, was first written in 1885 in a derivative of the Cree syllabics, in which, for a time, there was mass literacy. This writing system, including deviations from the ``official'' version, is here for the first time described in detail. In spite of its name, it is shown to be an alphabetic writing system. The usage of the system is discussed, and the differences between it and the antecedant Cree and Northwest Territories Athabaskan writing systems are elucidated.
Effective Uncountability in Carrier Lexical Semantics: Carrier lexical semantics makes use of a concept of "effective uncountability", that is, of sets of individuals of such a nature that their members are not normally, individuated. This notion characterizes one of the categories of the classificatory verb system, and is part of the definition of one of the verbs of eating, which describes the marked situation in which an "effectively uncountable" set is eaten in such a way as to individuate its members.
First Person Plural Subject in Ulkatcho Carrier: In most dialects of Carrier the subject marker /id/ (Stuart/Trembleur Lake dialect) or /id@d/ (Southern dialects), the reflex of the Proto-Athabaskan first person duo-plural subject marker, has become restricted to the dual, evidently due to partial blocking by the extension of /ts'/, the old indefinite subject marker, to first person plural subject. In the Ulkatcho dialect, however, while only /ts'/ can be used in the true plural, /id@d/ retains its original duo-plural usage; its use in the plural is not blocked by /ts'/. Ulkatcho dialect thus presents a counterexample to the strongest formulations of the blocking principle, under which the movement of the indefinite into the first person plural role ought to result in the immediate restriction of the old duo-plural to the dual. Ulkatcho presumably reflects the intermediate stage in the historical development. The indefinite first took on the added role of first person plural, resulting in competition between the two forms, as in Ulkatcho. Eventually, the two forms became fully differentiated, with the restriction of the old duo-plural to the dual, as in the majority of the dialects. A survey of the languages with which Ulkatcho Carrier has been in contact indicates that it is unlikely that the existence of competing forms is due to influence from another language as has been suggested by Kroch (1994).
Glide Formation and Compensatory Lengthening in Japanese: Demonstrates that it is indeed Glide Formation that induces vowel lengthening in Japanese and not, as proposed by Fukui, W-Deletion.
: Published in Linguistic Inquiry 19.3.494-503 (1988).
Indo-European Practice and Historical Methodology: One element of the recent controversy over historical methodology set off by Greenberg (1987)'s classification of American Indian languages has been his reliance on superficial lexical resemblances, with no attempt to establish phonological correspondences and no evidence from submerged morphology. Proponents of this methodology argue that this is the methodology used to establish the Indo-European language family, and that the success of these methods in the Indo-European case shows them to be reliable. We argue that this view of the history of Indo-European studies is seriously flawed, in two ways: (a) for the most part, neither the recognition of languages as IE nor their internal classification have been based primarily on superficial lexical resemblances; (b) where such methods were employed, they frequently led to erroneous results.
: Written with Lyle Campbell. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. (1992) pp. 214-236.
Japanese Periphrastic Verbs and Noun Incorporation: Japanese periphrastic verbs, consisting of a verbal noun together with the verb suru `do', are generally considered to be lexically incorporated. I argue that in fact they are not only not lexically incorporated, they are not incorporated at all, but remain analyzable at every level of representation. While it is possible to account for the Japanese facts without positing any sort of constituency of the verbal noun and suru, there are theoretical grounds for preferring an analysis in which the periphrastic complex consists of a V dominating N V, including the proposal that the introduction of non-head lexical categories is restricted to the expansion of lexical categories. Distinguishing this case and others like it from true incorporations makes possible the claim that true lexical incorporations are syntactically opaque.
Lexical Databases for Carrier: Research on Carrier, a dialectally diverse Athabaskan language of the central interior of British Columbia, has resulted in a fairly large amount of information stored on-line The databases in which this material is kept are used both for research and to generate printed dictionaries. The database system is home-brew, developed incrementally over a decade, primarily using UNIX tools. A similar system, though different in detail, underlies the Montana Salish (Flathead) dictionary. This paper describes this system and explore its virtues and vices.
: This is the revised and expanded text of the paper I had prepared, but due to illness was unable to give, for the workshop "New Methods for Creating, Exploring and Disseminating Linguistic Field Data", organized by Steven Bird under the auspices of the Talkbank Project at the University of Pennsylvania, on 6 January 2000 in Chicago, Illinois.
Lexical Periphrastics: A Third Periphrastic Construction in Japanese: Two periphrastic constructions, combining a verbal noun and suru "do", are generally recognized in Japanese. In one, the so-called "unincorporated" construction, the verbal noun is marked accusative and the object, if any, appears as a genitive complement within the full NP headed by the verbal noun. This construction is on all accounts unequivocally phrasal. In the other, the so-called "incorporated" construction, the verbal noun is not case-marked and the direct object, if any, is marked accusative. Although this construction has often been taken to involve lexical incorporation of the verbal noun into suru, there is considerable evidence that no incorporation takes place and that the construction is actually phrasal. The "incorporated" construction actually conflates two subtypes: in addition to the periphrastics that exhibit phrasal behaviour, there is a subset that exhibit truly lexical behaviour. These fail all eight tests for phrasal status and differ from phrasal "incorporated" periphrastics in another eleven properties. Recognizing this third construction eliminates a number of hitherto mysterious irregularities. Which nouns form lexical periphrastics and which phrasal is predictable phonologically: those verbal nouns that are underlyingly monosyllabic form lexical periphrastics. No explanation for this restriction is known.
真(MA): A discussion of the semantics of the Japanese morpheme /ma/, which is argued to be a prototype selector.
: In Carol Georgopolous and Roberta Ishihara (eds.) Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language: Essays in Honor of S.-Y. Kuroda. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. (1991). pp. 449-458.
Msort Reference Manual: Msort is a program for sorting text files in sophisticated ways, intended especially for linguistic databases. It allows arbitrary sort orders to be specified, with ranks defined for large numbers of multigraphs of effectively unlimited length. Records need not be single lines of text but may be delimited in a number of ways. The entire record may used as the sort key, or a particular field may be used. Key fields may be selected either by position in the record or by matching a regular expression to a tag. msort is capable of sorting on several keys, so that when two records tie on one key, the tie may be broken on another. Each key may have its own sort order. Any or all keys may be optional. In addition to lexicographic sorting, sorting by numerical value, date or time is supported. For each key a distinct set of characters may be excluded from consideration when sorting in any combination of initial, final, and medial position in the key field. Lexicographic keys may be reversed, allowing the construction of reverse dictionaries.
Making Athabaskan Dictionaries Usable: Designing a dictionary for an Athabaskan language presents unusual difficulties. Because of the enormous complexity of the verb, it is impossible to list every form of every verb. Because Athabaskan languages combine extensive prefixation with complex stem variation, and because the components that contain the basic meaning of the verb are distributed throughout the form, intercalated with grammatical morphemes, there is no straightforward, easily extracted and manipulated, citation form. Using a fixed member of the paradigm is also problematic because the user must have substantial knowledge of the language to be able to convert other forms to the citation form. As a result, dictionary designers have had two unpleasant choices. One is to use fully inflected forms. These are easy to use, but necessarily far from complete. The other possibility is to produce root-based analytic dictionaries. Such dictionaries may be comprehensive but are almost impossible to use for anyone without considerable meta-knowledge of the language. The way between the Scylla of incompleteness and the Charybdis of unusability is an on-line dictionary, internally analytic, with a morphological parser as front end. This will allow the user to enter a fully inflected word to be analyzed by the parser. However, difficult problems arise as to how to present the information generated by such a system. Just as finding a word in an analytic dictionary is not trivial, so is making use of the output from one.}
: This version differs from the published version in having a title page and abstract, but has the same page divisions and text.
The Names of the First Nations Languages of British Columbia: First Nations languages are referred to by an often puzzling variety of names. Many people are confused by the fact that apparently authoritative sources differ in the names they use. This paper provides details on the names of the languages of British Columbia, explains the factors underlying variation in nomenclature, and discusses the controversy over appropriate names.
Native Language Curriculum for Adults: Experience with a University-Level Carrier Curriculum: A description of a strongly grammar-based university-level Carrier curriculum, which enabled the students to produce and understand complex sentences that they had not previously heard. I argue that curricula based on culturally salient vocabulary and fixed expressions are not based on any authentic native tradition. Rather, they are ultimately the result of colonialism.
A Note on Sakhalin Ainu Morphophonemics: A discussion of certain alternations in the Rayciska dialect of Ainu, proposing a a simple phonological account in place of Murasaki's account, which involves lexically conditioned allomorphy. Includes a comparison with Hale's discussion of Maori passives.
Notes on Carrier Writing Systems: A comparison of the various writing systems that have been used for Carrier.
Noun Classification in Carrier: A discussion of the variety of the multiple, non-homomorphic systems of noun classification in Carrier, an Athabaskan language of Central British Columbia.
This is a significantly revised version of the previous paper of the same title.
Review of Mother of Writing: A review of Smalley et al.'s book about the Pahawh Hmong writing system and its development. Among other things, argues that this is an instance of onset-rime based writing rather than a truly segmental system.
: Published in Phonology 11.2.365-369. (1994).
On the End of the Ritwan Controversy: A critique of the claim that the relationship of Wiyot and Yurok to Algonquian was firmly established by Sapir's 1913 paper and that Mary Haas was of this view.
Review of Speech Communication: Human and Machine: Published in Journal of the International Phonetic Association20.2.52-54. (1990).
Review of Språk och skrift i Öst- och Sydöstasien: Published as a book notice in Language 68.3.665-666 (1992).
Review of Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese: Published in Anthropological Linguistics 44.1.103-106 (2002).
The Salinan and Yurumangui Data in Language in the Americas: An evaluation of the Salinan and Yurumangui data used by Joseph Greenberg in LIA on the basis of a three-way comparison of LIA, the data sources, and Greenberg's notebooks.
: As published in International Journal of American Linguistics 58.2.202-229. (1992), with different formatting and pagination.
Scope and Dummy Verbs in Carrier: In Carrier, an Athabaskan language of the Central Interior of British Columbia, the negative particle 'aw as well as some adverbs has rightward scope. As a result, material within the scope of negation other than the verb must follow 'aw, though topicalized constituents fall within scope even though they precede 'aw Other scope-bearing elements, including cha "also" and z "only", have leftward scope. These particles underlie the constructions S za Vaux "to keep on S-ing" and S cha Vaux "to S also", in which the choice of dummy verb Vaux is determined by the event type, valence, and aspect of the main clause. It is suggested that the use of the dummy verb results from the interaction of leftward scope with the requirement that the clause be verb final.
: In Marion Caldecott, Suzanne Gessner, and Eun-Sook Kim (eds.) University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics (Proceedings of the Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas) 2.107-115. Vancouver, British Columbia. (November 1999).
The Solid Phase of Water in Carrier: An exploration of the lexical field encompassing terms for snow, ice, hail, and frost in Carrier.
Sir Thomas Young and Statistical Evidence of Historical Relationship: Sir Thomas Young was the first, in 1819, to make explicit statistical calculations in support of genetic affiliation of languages. His mathematics was correct, but his application of it incorrect. He nonetheless deserves credit for his recognition of the problems inherent in this technique.
: Historiographia Linguistica XXIX.1-2.262-268 (2002) .
The Status of Chumash Sibilant Harmony: Chumash sibilant harmony, perhaps the strongest example of a feature-changing harmony rule, has been dismissed by Russell (1993) and Bird (1995), proponents of declarative approaches to phonology, as a `phonetic process'. This characterization does not stand up to analysis. Chumash sibilant harmony is indeed a phonological rule and must be dealt with by phonological theory.
The Status of Documentation for British Columbia Native Languages: A detailed description of the status of documention (grammars, dictionaries, collections of text, and university-level language textbooks) for the native languages of British Columbia, with bibliographic references. Includes information on the linguists knowledgable about BC native languages, and which ones are currently active. Prepared at the request of Grand Chief Edward John and first circulated in January 1999, this has been repeatedly updated and revised as new information has become available. [Yinka Dene Language Institute Technical Report #2.]
Web Pages for Studying Language and Culture: A discussion of how to use HTML and web browsers for studying language and culture, especially by creating interactive annotated texts. [Yinka Dene Language Institute Technical Report #3.]
Word-Internal Phrase Boundary in Japanese: Presents evidence that certain prefixes in Japanese are followed by a minor phrase boundary.
: In Sharon Inkelas and Draga Zec (eds.) The Phonology-Syntax Connection. Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University and University of Chicago Press. pp. 279-287 (1990).]