Ken Hale

Government and tonal phrasing in Papago

Our task in this paper will be to characterise the distribution of the (L)HL pattern in Papago sentences. Our analysis is that the phonological representation of a sentence of Papago consists of a sequence of one or more tonal phrases, and that (L)HL is the pattern assigned to a tonal phrase. This tonal phrasing -i.e. the beginnings and ends of individual tonal phrases will be indicated by parentheses in the tonal tier, as in (i) and (2). The association of the (L)HL pattern within each tonal phrase is captured by simple rules of the phonology, to be described in ?2. Thus the description of the syntax of Papago intonation contours will centre on the tonal phrasing itself, and on the manner in which it is determined with respect to surface syntactic structure. What we are going to show in this paper is that the mapping of syntactic

Internal Diversity in Uto-Aztecan: I

0. The purposes of this paper are (1) to group, on the basis of lexicostatistics, a sampling of Uto-Aztecan languages and (2) to present a method for determining whether the items in a given comparison are cognate. Lexicostatistics, variously called glottochronology or the Swadesh method, is a method whereby the time of separation of related languages can be ascertained in an approximate number of years. A basic list of 215 relatively culture free items was first developed which exhibited, on an average, 81 retentions out of 100 for a period of 1,000 years. By the law of chance, the percentage of retention for two related languages of the same time level was 81% of 81%, or 66 %.1 Later, in 1955, a new list of 100 items was developed which exhibited a higher rate of retention (r = 86%) which, for two related languages of the same time level, raised the retention rate per 1,000 years to 86% of 86%, or 74%.2 In the present paper, the second list was used. To determine the time of separation (denoted by t) of a pair of languages, the list was translated into the two languages, and the lists were compared to determine the percentage of cognates (denoted by C). The date was then worked out on the basis of the formula: t = log C + log r2.3

Remarks on Definiteness in Warlpiri

In this paper, we discuss some rather puzzling facts concerning the semantics of Warlpiri expressions of cardinality, i.e. the Warlpiri counterparts of English expressions like one, two, many, how many. The morphosyntactic evidence, discussed in Section 1, suggests that the corresponding expressions in Warlpiri are nominal, just like the Warlpiri counterparts of prototypical nouns, e.g. child. We also argue that Warlpiri has no articles or any other items of the syntactic category D(eterminer). In Section 2, we describe three types of readings — “definite”, “indefinite” and “predicative” — which are generally found with Warlpiri nouns, including those which correspond to English common nouns and cardinality expressions. A partial analysis of these readings is sketched in Section 3. Since Warlpiri has no determiner system, we hypothesize that the source of (in)definiteness in this language is semantic. More specifically, we suggest that Warlpiri nominals are basically interpreted as individual terms or predicates of individuals and that their three readings arise as a consequence of the interaction of their basic meanings, which are specific to Warlpiri, with certain semantic operations, such as type shifting (Rooth and Partee, 1982; Partee and Rooth, 1983; Partee, 1986, 1987), which universally can or must apply in the process of compositional semantic interpretation.

Some Preliminary Observations on Papago Morphophonemics

0. In this paper I will consider two quite different analyses of Papago phonology, both of which satisfy the fundamental requirement of observational adequacy, namely, that morphemes and morpheme sequences which are regarded by Papago speakers as being systematically different in sound be represented differently in the associated linguistic representation of Papago sentences. One of the analyses considered here provides a notation which is phonemic in the traditional sense (see 1 below), while the other (discussed in 2 and 3 below) includes a notation which is closer to what has traditionally been called morphophonemic. Each has associated with it a set of rules which imposes a phonetic interpretation upon strings represented in its notation. Chomsky has called the two different types of phonological representation, respectively, taxonomic phonemic and systematic phonemic. It is primarily from the writings of Sapir, Chomsky, and Halle that the theoretical orientation of this paper derives.2 The central concern here

On the Dagur Object Relative: Some Comparative Notes

In 1987, Ning Chunyan and I were able to spend a few hours doing “field work” on Dagur while I was teaching briefly at Heilongjiang University in Harbin. I was interested in doing work on any language that might be available at that time, and we were fortunate to meet three speakers of a language we came to know by the name of Daur (Dáwò’er). Neither of us had any knowledge of Mongolian, and so during the time we were actually eliciting material in the language, all we knew about it was its Chinese name, though we determined that it was an Altaic language upon hearing the first few sentences. Later, we found Zhong Shu Chun’s small but excellent Dawo’er Yu Jian Zhi (Brief Record of the Dagur Language (1963)) in the Hei Da library, and after returning to MIT, I found Samuel Martin’s useful Dagur Mongolian Grammar, Texts, and Lexicon (1961). In relation to the matter to be discussed here, the material we elicited departs somewhat from Martin’s findings but is in close accord with the material found in Zhong’s grammar. The construction with which I will be concerned here is illustrated by the following sentence (all examples are from field notes unless otherwise noted): (1) [[mini au-sen] mer-min] sain. [[1sGEN buy-PERF] horse-1sGEN] good

Some observations on the contributions of local languages to linguistic science

Abstract Much can be learned about the human linguistic faculty through the study of a a single natural language, or through the study of one linguistic family. Fundamental properties of Universal Grammar have been brought to light through the study of a few Indo-European languages, for example. But the simple exercise of comparing an imaginary world of just one language, or one language family, with the existing world of some 6,000 languages makes it clear that linguistic diversity is a necessary condition for an understanding of both the truly elemental principles of human linguistic knowledge and the full range of possibilities permitted by them. The grammatical systems of ‘local’ languages have been, and continue to be, crucial to the discipline. Examples from Hopi (North American) and Lardil (Australian) illustrate the thesis that linguistic diversity is necessary to understand even the linguistic features and principles involved in phenomena of an apparently accessible character — i.e., grammatical number and affixal concord. Syntactic examples from Navajo (North American) and Misumalpan (Central American) exemplify the role which (apparent) counterexamples can play in compelling researchers to continue to press for deeper understanding of grammatical systems.

Subject Obviation, Switch Reference, and Control

The following sentences, from Hopi (Uto-Aztecan, American Southwest) and the Misumalpan languages Miskitu and Ulwa (Atlantic Coast, Nicaragua), illustrate structures in which an argument of a matrix clause can be said to “control” the subject of a complement clause

Navajo Verb Stem Position and the Bipartite Structure of the Navajo Conjunct Sector

The Navajo verb stem appears at the rightmost edge of the verb word. In numerous cases it forms a lexical constituent with a preverb, occurring at the leftmost edge of the surface verb word, much in the manner of Dutch and German verb-particle arrangements in verb-second finite clauses. In Navajo the initial and final positions are separated by eight morpheme order slots recognized in the Athabaskan literature (and described in detail for Navajo in Young and Morgan 1987). A phonological solution to this and a number of other deep-surface disparities is explored here, based on the insights of earlier works on the Navajo verb, including Speas 1984, 1990, McDonough 1996, 2000, and Rice 1989, 2000.

Toward a Manual of Papago Grammar: Some Phonological Terms

The present authors have shared the responsibility for the contents of this paper in the following way. Alvarez, a native speaker of Papago, has composed section 3, a partial account of his decisions in the development of a phonological terminology for Papago. Hale, a linguist with some experience in the study of Papago, has written sections 1 and 2. The authors worked together in editing section 3 and in producing the English version in section 4.

On Suppletion, Selection, and Agreement

In Hopi and Papago, Uto-Aztecan languages of the American Southwest, some verbs occur in suppletive pairs for number. The members of such pairs are selected in accordance with the number category associated with a direct argument of the verb — i.e., the subject or object. In Hopi, the number category relevant to verbal suppletion may be expressed as the feature opposition [± plural].