Anthony C. Woodbury

The functions of rhetorical structure: A study of Central Alaskan Yupik Eskimo discourse

Discourse structure in Central Alaskan Yupik Eskimo (CAY) narrative and conversation is examined, and a general notion of rhetorical structure is proposed, growing out of recent work in the poetics of Native American oral literature. Rhetorical structure in a given language would consist of prosodically and intonationally signaled phonological phrasing along with whatever other significant formal features consistently pattern or interact with it (minimally surface syntactic constituency, typically also the system of sentence adverbs and conjunctions, further intonational features, and patterns of parallelism and repetition). Findings for CAY as well as other works in the literature indicate at least four important communicative functions for rhetorical structure in addition to its role in verbal art: organization of information, expression of affective meaning, indexing of genre, and regulation of dialogic interaction. (Discourse, syntax–phonology–discourse interaction, ethnopoetics; Native America, Alaska, Yupik Eskimo)

A Holistic Humanities of Speaking: Franz Boas and the Continuing Centrality of Texts1

We take up Boas’s commitment to the establishment of a large corpus of texts from the indigenous languages and peoples of the Americas, examining what we take to be his fundamental principles: using texts as the philological record from which to document and explore language, culture, and intellectual life on their own terms; training speakers to engage in documentation through the creation and analysis of texts; and a focus on the emergence of patterns and interrelationships. We then outline what we see as his influence up to now, both directly through the kinds of projects he promoted and indirectly through a broader application of Boasian principles that has animated a series of later movements. Finally, we discuss the prospects for a more comprehensive text- and documentation-centered approach to language and culture that welds together these themes and movements, and which we envision as a holistic humanities of speaking.

Affixial verbs in syntax: A reply to Grimshaw and Mester

ConclusionsWe have pointed to a range of data which fulfill exactly the predictions G & M ascribe to a syntactic theory of Eskimo complex verb constructions. In particular we have found that complex verbs occur in different phrase structure configurations from ordinary verbs and trigger different kinds of case marking and that anaphoric processes must recognize clause boundaries within complex verbs; that the internal structure of certain complex verbs is unique in a way that argues for word-internal clause boundaries; that derivations by means of suffixes of the -kqu- class have the same sorts of properties as syntactic causatives; that certain suffixes distinguish between basic and derived stems, and that certain derived forms do not interact freely with other word formation processes.We therefore suggest that any adequate theory of Eskimo morphology must recognize the syntactic salience of certain word-internal formatives. An adequate theory must, in particular, provide a level of analysis at which there are clause boundaries that do not correspond to the word structure of the language.For one such theory which has the advantage of not requiring the interspersal of syntactic and morphological rules, see Sadock (1985). In all of this, we have been critical of an application of (a particular version of) the Lexicalist Hypothesis. But it is far from our intention to banish the hypothesis absolutely. Rather, we seek to clarify two logically separate sets of principles which in various formulations of the Lexicalist Hypothesis have tended to merge. First there is the recent notion that the formal word — with or without clitics and inflection — is the output of the lexicon and the sole formative in syntax (Aronoff, 1976; Lapointe, 1980; Anderson, 1982). This is the view G & M take. For Eskimo and other polysynthetic languages this isolates what Swadesh (1939) termed an “external syntax” (as opposed to an “internal syntax” within words). Such an approach does correctly isolate surface words in Eskimo which, though elaborate, manifest known phenomena and principles of formal morphology in quite an unexceptional way (see Sadock, 1980, 1985). On the other hand when taken by itself, Eskimo external syntax is aberrant and even incoherent given known principles of syntax in other languages such as Functional Uniqueness and Structure Preservation. Thus the formal surface word provides criteria that are only partly useful in Universal Grammar.The second set of principles has to do with complete distributional and semantic productivity and was proposed in Chomskys (1970) original Lexicalist Hypothesis. For English and other relatively analytic languages these principles yield syntactic formatives only slightly different from surface words: productively-formed destroying contains two formatives, while (slightly) irregular destruction contains one. For Eskimo languages however, these principles divide most words into productive bases and suffixes (such as those we have been considering in this paper).Like full words in less synthetic languages, these formatives themselves usually contain distributionally and semantically irregular formations, leading to a distinction between less-than-productive ‘real’ morphology and a totally productive ‘internal syntax’. Two excellent examples of Eskimo ‘real’ morphology are the causative transitivizer +te- in (24)–(26), and the irregular antipassives following -guma- discussed in reference to G & Ms prediction VI: the former is an element in the formation of productive bases, the later in the formation of productive suffixes. Our contention has been that when the syntax is allowed access to these productive elements, the aberrations of pure ‘external syntax’ will disappear while familiar phenomena and principles of syntax will reemerge. If we are correct, then this earlier set of lexicalist principles also belongs in Universal Grammar. The task then must be to determine how much and in what ways formal morphological principles and distributional syntactic principles interact and constrain each other in an explanatory Universal Grammar, how the roles of each can be restricted, and how syntactically analyzed strings can and cannot map into morphological analyses of the same strings. Research into the many polysynthetic languages of the Americas and elsewhere, undertaken with genuine openness to richness that may be found, must play a major role in this.Allen et al. (1984) on Southern Tiwa and Goddard (to appear) on Fox, in very different ways, point out the importance of this problem and the breadth of the North American data.