Daniel Harbour

Valence and Atomic Number

The semantic basis and morphosyntactic reflexes of Kiowa-Tanoan noun classification are perspicuously captured in a system with three bivalent number features: [±singular], [±augmented], [±group]. Privative analyses of the same facts require, inter alia, features without semantic motivation, syntactic mechanisms that violate Inclusivity, and feature annotation reminiscent of bivalence. The semantic atoms of number are, therefore, bivalent.

The Kiowa Case for Feature Insertion

Kiowas rich fusional agreement system, with its systematic divergences between what is said and what is meant, shows that Morphology must permit the insertion of contextually unmarked feature values and that it is ipso facto postsyntactic.

The universal basis of local linguistic exceptionality

Evans & Levinson (E&L) claim Kiowa number as a prime example of the semantically unexpected, threatening both Universal Grammar and Linguistic Universals. This commentary, besides correcting factual errors, shows that the primitives required for Kiowa also explain two unrelated semantically unexpected patterns and derive two robust Linguistic Universals. Consequently, such apparent exceptionality argues strongly for Universal Grammar and against E&L.

THE LINGUISTIC GENIUS OF PARKER MCKENZIE'S KIOWA ALPHABET

We present a linguistic analysis of the Kiowa writing system invented by the untrained Kiowa linguist, (Dr.) Parker McKenzie, revealing he designed his alphabet around such core linguistic concepts as place of articulation, glottalic manner of articulation, allophony, and phonotactics. Despite his substantial contribution to Harrington’s understanding of phonetics, he rejected the extreme phoneticism of Harrington’s orthographies and instead independently developed a system that is phonemic, except for very minor rulegoverned deviations that reflect his personal normative concerns.

Poor pronoun systems and what they teach us

The world’s smallest pronoun systems can eschew any of the following contrasts: (i) author–nonauthor, (ii) participant–nonparticipant, (iii) singular–nonsingular. This supports the view that features are mutually independent parameters (Harbour 2011a, 2014a, 2014b), but is problematic for Koeneman and Zeijlstra’s (2014) recent reworking of the Rich Agreement Hypothesis, which is predicated on the claim that (i)–(iii) are universally obligatory.

Parameters of Poor Pronoun Systems

The world’s smallest pronoun systems can eschew any of the following contrasts: (a) author-nonauthor, (b) participant-nonparticipant, (c) singular-nonsingular. This supports the view that features are mutually independent parameters (Harbour 2011a, 2014a, 2016), but is problematic for Koeneman and Zeijlstra’s (2014) reworking of the Rich Agreement Hypothesis, which is predicated on the claim that (a)–(c) are universally obligatory. The facts necessitate revision of Koeneman and Zeijlstra’s proposal.

Information Structure, Discourse Structure, and Noun Phrase Position in Kiowa1

The Kiowa clause may be divided, on the basis of syntactic theory, into three distinct domains. Although Kiowa is a canonical “free word order” language, we demonstrate that use of these domains is strongly constrained by information-structural and, in some cases, discourse-structural and discourse-pragmatic properties. We analyze these factors, discuss different methodological options for such research, and examine the word order properties of a short glossed text.