John Stonham

VERB-ARGUMENT COMPOSITION IN NUUCHAHNULTH : A SPECIAL CASE OF DENOMINAL VERB FORMATION

Nuuchahnulth, a Southern Wakashan language spoken on the west coast of Vancouver Island, Canada, frequently forms complex, composite predicates. Previous accounts of this phenomenon have described it as either a type of (noun) incorporation or as denominal verb formation, in both cases due to the fact that it involves the combining with the verb of an external element originating in the object. The focus of this article is to present the facts of Nuuchahnulth verb–object interactions and an alternative characterization of the interaction that treats it as a special case of denominal verb formation, referred to here as Verb–Argument Composition (VAC).

Middle Korean ㅿ and the Cheju dialect

All records of Middle Korean are exclusively in the Central dialect, the prestige form spoken in the capital, and all printed material in the newly-created Hangul script emanated from there. For this reason, historical studies must rely on modern dialect data for comparison and reconstruction, since there are virtually no early dialect materials. In this study, I investigate the nature of the MK Δ, which is most often realized as /O/ in Modern Standard Korean, but which often surfaces as /s/ in Southern varieties, including the most conservative of these dialects, Cheju Korean. Sino-Korean forms in Cheju dialect containing an /s/ reflex of Δ demonstrate not only that Δ was realized as /z/ in such forms, but also that the dialects must have had special phonological rules to deal with their pronunciation. A further important issue concerns the nature of doublets and their treatment in both Middle Korean and Cheju dialect.

Labialization in Nuuchahnulth

In this article we examine the phonetic properties of labialization in Nuuchahnulth, a Southern Wakashan language spoken on Vancouver Island. Given the moribund status of this language, we make use of available archival materials from the early twentieth century along with more recent recordings in order to ascertain the exact nature of the process. Early work on this language was conducted by Edward Sapir, who transcribed data in a more or less phonetic form. A second goal of our paper is to test the accuracy of Sapirs transcriptions. Finally, we examine the characteristics of Nuuchahnulth labialization which mark it as an important typological phenomenon.