Thomas E. Payne

Pronouns in Yagua Discourse

Quels sont les facteurs qui determinent le choix des formes libres ou des formes cliticisees des pronoms en discours, dans la langue yagua

The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO)

NACLO (North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) is an annual Olympiad-style contest for high school students, focusing on linguistics, computational linguistics, and language technologies.

Nouns and Nominals

This chapter discusses nouns and other word classes that function syntactically as nominals. It gives the defining morphological and syntactic characteristics of nouns, and discusses nominal subclasses determined by possession. In Panare some semantically non-prototypical nouns do exhibit some morphology that differentiates them from more prototypical nouns. These criteria will be important in arguing for and against certain syntactic analyses, and therefore described in some detail. The chapter discusses four morphological properties and four syntactic properties specific to the grammar of Panare which identify lexical items in context as nominal versus nonnominal. It also describes genitive classifiers, which also function as nominals. The chapter outlines the systems of pronouns and demonstratives. The Panare pronoun/demonstrative system distinguishes person and number, and for third persons animacy, spatial deixis and visibility/invisibility. Keywords:morphological characteristics; nominals; nouns; Panare; syntactic characteristics

Nominal Derivation and “Possessive” Denominalization

This chapter describes a set of processes involve nominalization, producing action nominalizations, participant nominalizations of various sorts, and abstract noun formations. It focuses on three denominalizers that all relate to the idea of “ownership”. There are three suffixes which occur exclusively on nominal roots to derive verbs concerned with ownership, i.e., possession or deprivation of an object or an attribute. Some derivational affixes applied to noun roots result in nouns with substantial meaning differences. In Panare, as in other Cariban languages, the issue of nominalization is salient for at least three reasons. First, there are many suffixal and ambifixal nominalizers which may occur on verb, ad-form and adverb roots and stems. Second, the use of these nominalized forms in discourse is very frequent. Third, some (but not all) nominalizers synchronically have multiple functions: they may derive nouns, but many have also been reanalyzed as Tense-Aspect-Mode affixes. Keywords:Cariban languages; nominalization; noun; Panare; suffixes; verbs

Phonology and Morphophonology

The orthography used in Panare examples in the work is a slightly modified form of the orthography adopted by the Venezuelan Ministry of Education, Department of Indigenous Affairs, for educational materials in Panare. This chapter illustrates several categories of phonological and morphophonological processes. Word-level primary stress is normally on the final syllable but in some cases is lexically marked elsewhere. Grammatical stress may override lexical stress. Additionally, secondary stress affects heavy syllables and may in an alternating pattern in sequences of light syllables. The process of syllable reduction, first noted by Mattei Muller (1981) is sensitive to stress and vowel quality. Various phonological processes are described, first those that affect consonants, then those that affect vowels. This analysis explains certain facts that would simply be classified as irregularities from a purely synchronic perspective. Finally, a few of the common “normal-speech” contractions are described. Keywords:grammatical stress; morphophonological processes; orthography; Panare; phonological processes; syllable reduction; vowel quality