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Building Meaning In Navajo, Elizabeth A. Bogal-Allbritten

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation contributes to the growing tradition of work in which detailed exploration of understudied languages informs formal semantic and syntactic theory and probes the tension between crosslinguistic grammatical variation and crosslinguistic commonality in communicative goals. The dissertation focuses on two topics in Navajo (Diné Bizaad): (i) attitudes of 'thinking' and 'desiring' and (ii) the expression of adjectival meaning and degree constructions. The first part of the dissertation presents the methodological and linguistic background for the rest of the dissertation. Chapter 1 discusses the project of crosslinguistic semantic research and fieldwork methodology. Chapter 2 gives a broad introduction to the …