Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Koh Verbal System, Suellyn H. Glidden

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

From the introduction: "The purpose is to describe the Koh verbal system in terms of its grammatical forms and their possible meanings. Special attention is given to the tense-aspect-mood (TAM) system. The formally marked categories of the TAM system are relatively few in Koh. In fact Koh is a "tenseless" language in the sense that temporal deixis does not appear as a formal category in the verbal system. Rather, it is a sentence level function or is derived from the discourse-pragmatic context. There are one basic mood opposition and four aspectual categories. One aspectual category has a restricted usage. Even …

Red Lake Falls, Minnesota: A Sociolinguistic Survey, James Kapper

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

From the introduction: "Despite the varied ancestry of the area's population, and a time span of more than a century for the mechanism of the American "melting pot" to have done its work, a relatively large number of people in the area still use the French language in their homes and describe themselves and their communities as "French."

"The background of the community and the survival of the language pose sociolinguistic questions concerning the status of the language in the community, the users of the language, and the situations in which it is used. The center of this study is …

Referential Distance And Discourse Structure In Yagua, Thomas E. Payne

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

From the introduction: "This paper concerns Yagua, a lowland language of Peru. It also concerns the choices speakers make as to how they will refer to or "code" participants in discourse. The body of this paper will be organized into two broad parts corresponding to these two most general concerns. In the first part, consisting of Sect. 2, I will describe the major formal devices used to code participants in Yagua. In the second part, Sect. 3 and 4, I will look at the use of those devices in a body of folkloric narrative texts. I will take as a …

Fortis/Lenis Consonants In Guichicovi Mixe: A Preliminary Acoustic Study, J. Albert Bickford

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

From the introduction: "This paper focuses on the fortis/lenis contrast in consonants in the Guichicovi dialect of Mixe (Mixe-Zoquean; Oaxaca, Mexico), and uses instrumental data to support a proposed phonological analysis of this contrast. In the remainder of Sect. 1, I briefly survey prior work on this contrast, especially as it impacts on the claim that Mixe has three contrastive vowel lengths. I summarize the phonetic and phonological facts that were determined by ordinary techniques of phonetic transcription, and describe the phonological hypothesis for which I wanted confirmation from instrumental data. In Sect. 2, I describe the instrumental study, including …

A Note On Ergativity, S', And S'' In Karitiana, Daniel L. Everett

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

From the introduction: "Ergativity has long been an important topic in linguistic research, from both a typological (Comrie 1978, Dixon 1979, Plank 1979) as well as a theoretical perspective (Levin 1983, Marantz 1984). The purpose of the present study is to contribute to the discussion of this phenomenon via a study of a fragment of the grammar of Karitiana, an Amazon language, focusing especially on its ergative-absolutive marking of affirmative particles and personal pronouns. The special features of the Karitiana (henceforth K) system are: (1) only absolutive marking need be stated by rule, ergative case being a default mechanism, and …

Ñumí Mixtec Syllable Structure And Morphology, Laura Gittlen, Stephen A. Marlett

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

From the introduction: "[...] we discuss the morphology and segmental morphophonemics of Mixtec in a degree of detail which has never been done before. The most novel aspect of our work below, for Mixtec studies, is that we posit underlying forms for the two tense prefixes and then account for the variety of surface forms. Since in many--indeed, in a majority--of situations the underlying segments are not present in the surface form, the analysis is not immediately obvious."

Some Aspects Of Zapotecan Clausal Syntax, Stephen A. Marlett

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

From the introduction: "In this paper I discuss pronouns and various syntactic constructions in Zapotecan (Z) languages. My major goal is to present a broad overview of the similarities and differences which exist among the various members of the Zapotecan group in these syntactic constructions, which I generally discuss in theory-neutral terms."

The Inflectional/Derivational Distinction, David H. Tuggy

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

From the introduction: "The traditional distinction between inflectional and derivational morphology is a useful one, but it is quite complex and difficult to apply to actual forms. With this, as with other linguistic distinctions, there is a tendency to assume that we have an absolute binary distinction, a dichotomy, a hard-and-fast line, with everything on one side purely inflectional and everything on the other side purely derivational. I do not believe the facts fit such a model.

"I would claim that the distinction is better viewed as gradual or scalar along several parameters. In other words, rather than the dichotomy …

Syllable Structure And Aspect Morphology In Isthmus Zapotec, Stephen A. Marlett, Velma B. Pickett

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

From the introduction: "In this article we discuss the basic features of Isthmus Zapotec (IZ) syllable structure. Although previous work (Pickett 1967) has done this in some detail already, the present work differs from the previous analysis. First, the constituent "rhyme" is used and found useful, but "nucleus" and "syllable-final margin" are not. Second, glides are analyzed as forming part of the rhyme in some instances, whether they precede or follow the vowel. Third, glottal stop is analyzed here as a laryngeal feature of the vowel rather than as a consonant restricted to syllable-final position. Fourth, in the present analysis …

Front Matter For Sil-Und Work Papers Vol. 29 (1985)

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

No abstract provided.