Melissa Axelrod

The semantics of time : aspectual categorization in Koyukon Athabaskan

Koyukon is an Athabaskan language spoken along the Yukon and Koyukuk rivers in Alaska. Even among the Athabaskan languages, which are noted for the richness of their aspectual inventories and the diversity of expression possible from these inventories, Koyukon has the most elaborate and richly varied possibilities of morphologically marked derivational aspect. (Aspect is the nature of the action of a verb as to its beginning, duration, completion, or repetition and without referenced to its position in time, and the set of inflected verb forms that indicate aspect). The work consists of three parts: an examination of the aspectual system, which involved sorting out a complex network of four modes, fifteen aspects, four superaspects, and some 300 aspect-dependent derivational prefix strings; an analysis of the organization of verb-theme categories, which are directly linked to aspectual categories; and an assessment of the function of the aspectual system as a whole.

The Roles of Literacy and Collaboration in Documenting Native American Languages: A Report from the Jicarilla Apache Dictionary Project

This article reports on the progress of a project to produce a dictionary of the Jicarilla Apache language. Jicarilla, an Eastern Apachean language, is spoken on the Jicarilla Apache reservation in northern New Mexico. Approximately 21 percent of the population is fluent in the language. This is a collaborative project involving linguists and a small circle of speakers in the Jicarilla Apache community in Dulce, New Mexico. Through this project we have learned much about the role of literacy in language standardization and in speaker empowerment, and we believe that many parallels exist between writing a dictionary of an endangered Native American language and writing a dictionary of a sign language.