Oxford Studies of Endangered Languages – serie

This book documents the interrogative system of Ikpana, an endangered indigenous Ghana-Togo Mountain language of eastern Ghana also known as Logba. The system is notable in several respects. It exhibits features that buck certain typological trends, act as counterexamples to some claims about language universals, and exemplify fascinating patterns that are either rare or unfamiliar in interrogative systems cross-linguistically. Drawing on original fieldwork and a combination of formal/theoretical, experimental, and comparative methodologies, the book provides a theoretically-informed description and analysis of Ikpana interrogative grammar, encompassing both syntactic and phonological aspects of question formation in the language. The chapters explore a range of phenomena including polar question formation, wh- movement, wh- in-situ, interrogative intonation, and prosody, among others. The authors demonstrate that theoretically-guided language documentation does not only contribute to language description, but can also increase understanding of the human Language Faculty and expand the empirical base of language typologies: bringing formal and theoretical concerns to the fore facilitates richer descriptions of the grammar than purely descriptive approaches allow.

This book serves as a definitive reference for the inverse morphology of the Algonquian languages, which has attracted much attention in typological and theoretical linguistics. Will Oxford describes the patterning of inverse morphology across the Algonquian family and presents a framework for understanding the structure and function of the Algonquian inverse that is empirically driven and typologically grounded. He presents data from all documented Algonquian languages and considers not only the morphology of the inverse construction but also its syntax and pragmatics, giving equal weight to diachronic, typological, functional, and formal perspectives. From the integration of these perspectives, a simple and coherent understanding of the nature of the inverse emerges. The key proposal is that the inverse is "deep" in some contexts and "shallow" in others. In interactions between two third persons, the inverse is a "deep" patient voice construction that inverts the canonical morphology, syntax, and pragmatics of a transitive clause. In interactions between a third person and a first or second person, the inverse is a "shallow" hierarchical agreement pattern implemented through a spurious use of patient voice morphology, inverting the canonical morphology of a transitive clause but having no effect on syntax or pragmatics. This split analysis, which reflects the likely diachronic development of the Algonquian inverse, is argued to have various benefits, including the resolution of a longstanding controversy over the syntactic status of the inverse.

This book examines the tone and accent of Oklahoma Cherokee, in which six possible pitch patterns can occur on a syllable: low, high, low-high, high-low, lowfall, and superhigh. It provides a comprehensive description and analysis of these patterns, examining their distribution, their source, the principles that determine their positions, and the nature of tonal alternations. The tone and accent of Oklahoma Cherokee displays some typologically unusual features, such as the glottal stop as the historical source for both high and lowfall tones, the coexistence of tonal and accentual systems, the existence of multiple accentual systems, and the morphosyntactic use of accents. Studies on tones in general have focused mainly on analytical languages or languages with little morphology, but Cherokee is unique in that it is polysynthetic at the same time as tonal. The emergence of tones in Oklahoma Cherokee is recent and its source is easily traceable, but the language has already developed a complex tonal alignment and tonal phonology. Hiroto Uchihara's description of tone and accent in Oklahoma Cherokee will not only contribute to a deeper understanding of the sound system of Cherokee, but will also advance the historical study of Iroquoian languages as a whole, and the typological study of tonal and accentual systems more generally.

This book presents a controlled evaluation of three widely practised syntactic theories on the basis of the extremely complex agreement system of Archi, an endangered Nakh-Daghestanian language. Even straightforward agreement examples are puzzling for syntacticians because agreement involves both redundancy and arbitrariness. Agreement is a significant source of syntactic complexity, exacerbated by the great diversity of its morphological expression. Imagine how the discipline of linguistics would be if expert practitioners of different theories met in a collaborative setting to tackle such challenging agreement data - to test the limits of their models and examine how the predictions of their theories differ given the same linguistic facts. Following an overview of the essentials of Archi grammar and an introduction to the remarkable agreement phenomena found in this language, three distinct accounts of the Archi data examine the tractability and predictive power of major syntactic theories: Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, and Minimalism. The final chapter compares the problems encountered and the solutions proposed in the different syntactic analyses and outlines the implications of the challenges that the Archi agreement system poses for linguistic theory.

This volume explores the grammar of Niuean, an endangered Polynesian language spoken on the island of Niue and in New Zealand, with a focus on the issue of predication. Since Aristotle, it has been claimed that a sentence consists of a subject and a predicate. Niuean constitutes the perfect testing ground for this claim: it displays verb-subject-object word order, in which the subject interrupts the predicate, and has an ergative case system, in which subjects are not clearly distinguished from objects in their marking for grammatical case. Diane Massam uses the framework of generative grammar to carry out a detailed analysis of the internal structure of Niuean predicates and arguments, as well as the relations between them, touching on many other topics including the nature of displacement, word formation, determiners, and thematic roles. The proposal is that Niuean complex predicates are formed via successive inversion, prior to the merge of all arguments (high argument merge), and that the predicate undergoes fronting to initial position across the arguments, with the same structure found also in nominal clauses. The conclusion is that Niuean does not have a subject in the usual sense, and this is related to the fact that the language has isolating morphology, lacking all tense and agreement inflection and nominative case. Instead, the language exhibits low absolutive predication, applicative ergative agents, and predicate fronting in lieu of subject extraction. The book extends our understanding of cross-linguistic sentence structure and grammatical case, and will be of interest to scholars in the fields of Austronesian linguistics, typology, and theoretical linguistics.

This book explores the results of language contact in Michif, an endangered Canadian language that is traditionally claimed to combine a French noun phrase with a Cree verb phrase, and is hence usually considered a 'mixed' language. Carrie Gillon and Nicole Rosen provide a detailed account of the Michif noun phrase in which they examine issues such as the mass/count distinction, plurality, gender, articles, and demonstratives. Their analysis reveals that while parts of the Michif noun phrase have French lexical sources, and the language has certain features that are borrowed from French, its syntax in fact looks very much like that found in other Algonquian languages. The final chapter of the book discusses the wider implications of these findings: the authors argue that contact does not create a whole new language category and that Michif should instead be considered an Algonquian language with French contact influence; they also extend their analysis to other mixed languages and creoles. The book will be of interest to Algonquian scholars, formal linguists in the fields of syntax, morphology, and semantics, and to all those working on issues of language contact.

This volume offers a Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) analysis of the morphosyntax of Barayin, a Chadic language spoken by about 6000 people in the Guera region of Chad. The core chapters of the book draw on rich empirical data to provide analyses of the basic clause, noun phrases, verb phrases, and serial verb constructions. The version of LFG adopted here includes two recent innovations: the first is minimal c-structure, which results in simpler phrase structure representations; the second is the assumption that glue semantics accounts for argument selection, rejecting the need for a level of a-structure or for Completeness and Coherence in f-structure. Argument sharing in serial verb constructions can thus be modeled in a connected s-structure. This method of modeling semantic composition in complex predicates is extended to directional and associated motion complex predicates in Choctaw and Wambaya, removing the need to appeal to a special mechanism to unite semantic forms in such constructions.

This book offers detailed empirical coverage of the syntax and semantics of Plains Cree, an Algonquian language of western Canada. It combines careful elicitation with corpus studies to provide the first systematic investigation of the two distinct verbal inflectional paradigms - independent and conjunct - in the language.The book argues that the independent order denotes an indexical clause type with familiar deictic properties, while the conjunct order is an anaphoric clause type whose reference is determined by rules of anaphoric dependence. Both syntactic and semantic considerations are examined: on the syntactic side, indexical clauses are shown to be restricted to a subset of matrix environments, and to exclude proforms that have clause-external antecedents or induce cross-clausal dependencies. Anaphoric clauses have an elsewhere distribution: they occur in both matrix and dependent contexts, and freely host and participate in cross-clausal dependencies. The semantic discussion focusses primarily on the context in which a proposition is evaluated: it shows that indexical clauses have absolute tense and a speaker origo, consistent with deixis on a speech act; anaphoric clauses, by contrast, use anaphoric dependencies to establish the evaluation context. Data from Plains Cree is compared to the matrix/subordinate system found in English, to the clause-chaining system of the Amele language of Papua New Guinea, and to Romance subjunctive clauses. The book also provides the first micro-typology of pronominal marking and initial change in Algonquian languages.