Maliseet-Passamaquoddy verb morphology


Book Description

This is a study of the verb morphology of Maliseet, a dialect of the Eastern Algonquian language Maliseet-Passamaquoddy.




Accent & Syllable Structure in Passamaquoddy


Book Description

First published in 1993. The focus of this study is a set of related problems in the phonology of Passamaquoddy involving stress assignment and syncope. Both of these processes make a distinction between stressable and unstressable vowels.







Tales from Maliseet Country


Book Description

During the summer of 1963, Harvard linguist Karl V. Teeter traveled along the Saint John River, the great thoroughfare of Native New Brunswick, Canada, with his principal Maliseet consultant, Peter Lewis Paul. Together they recorded a series of tales from Maliseet elders whom Paul regarded as among the best Maliseet storytellers born before 1900, including Charles Laporte, Matilda Sappier, Solomon Polchies, William Saulis, and Alexander Sacobie. Paul also contributed eleven narratives of his own.øTales from Maliseet Country presents the transcripts and translations of the texts Teeter collected, together with one tale recorded by linguist Philip S. LeSourd in 1977. The stories range from chronicles of shamanistic activity and mysterious events of the distant past, through more conventionally historical narratives, to frankly fictional yarns, fairy tales with roots in European traditions, and personal accounts of subsistence activities and reservation life. This entertaining and revealing volume testifies to the rich heritage of the Maliseets and the enduring vibrancy of their culture today.øFeaturing a bilingual format, with Maliseet and English on facing pages, this is the first extensive collection to be published in the Maliseet language, a member of the far-flung Algonquian family spoken in New Brunswick. The volume is also the first to provide full phonemic transcriptions, including the notation of accentual contrasts, of the Maliseet tales. An authoritative introduction provides a guide to interpreting the texts.




Defying Maliseet Language Death


Book Description

Published through the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Today, indigenous communities throughout North America are grappling with the dual issues of language loss and revitalization. While many communities are making efforts to bring their traditional languages back through educational programs, for some communities these efforts are not enough or have come too late to stem the tide of language death, which occurs when there are no remaining fluent speakers and the language is no longer used in regular communication. The Maliseet language, as spoken in the Tobique First Nation of New Brunswick, Canada, is one such endangered language that will either be revitalized and survive or will die off. Defying Maliseet Language Death is an ethnographic study by Bernard C. Perley, a member of this First Nation, that examines the role of the Maliseet language and its survival in Maliseet identity processes. Perley examines what is being done to keep the Maliseet language alive, who is actively involved in these processes, and how these two factors combine to promote Maliseet language survival. He also explores questions of identity, asking the important question: ?If Maliseet is no longer spoken, are we still Maliseet?? This timely volume joins the dual issues of language survival and indigenous identity to present a unique perspective on the place of language within culture.




Suppletion in Verb Paradigms


Book Description

This book examines stem change in verb paradigms, as in English go 'go.PRESENT' vs. went 'go.PAST', a phenomenon referred to as suppletion in current linguistic theory. The work is based on a broad sample of 193 languages, and examines this long neglected phenomenon from a typological perspective. In addition to identifying types of suppletion which occur cross-linguistically, the study brings to light areal patterns of the occurrence of suppletive forms in verb paradigms. Several hypotheses as regards the diachronic development of suppletive forms are presented as well. The author also seeks to explore the methodological issues of evaluating the frequency of linguistic features in large language samples by introducing a method of weighting languages according to their genetic relatedness. All figures obtained in this way are compared to the proportions yielded by more familiar counting methods, and the results and implications of the different procedures are compared and discussed throughout.




Yearbook of Morphology 1991


Book Description

MARK ARONOFF The articles included in this section represent recent research on morpholog ical classes which has been independently performed by a number of investi gators. This work was presented at a symposium that was organized as part of the 1990-1991 annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Chicago in January 1991. Our aim in presenting this work is twofold: on the one hand, we would like to encourage others interested in morphology to pursue the types of research that we present. This is especially important in the study of morphological classes, which, while they are widespread among the languages of the world, are also highly diverse and often quite complex. On the other hand, we hope to convince researchers in adjacent areas to provide a place for autonomous morphology in their general picture of the workings of language and to pay closer attention to the intricacies of the interactionbetweenmorphologyand theseareas.




The Morphosyntax of the Algonquian Conjunct Verb


Book Description

The book investigates the synatctic distribution of the Algonquian Conjuct verb from the theoretical perspective of the Minimalist Program.




The Algonquian Inverse


Book Description

This book serves as a definitive reference for inverse morphology across all documented Algonquian languages. It 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.




Quantification


Book Description

This volume presents articles by formal linguists on quantification in (relatively) understudied languages. The ten contributions provide analysis of quantificational phenomena in languages from nine different families: Eskimo-Aleut, Algonquian, Na-Dene, Austronesian, Basque, Quechua, Otomanguean, Bantu, and Chadic. Approximately half of the papers present systematic overviews of quantificational phenomena in the respective languages; the remainder of the papers present theoretical analyses of specific quantificational constructions. The cross-linguistic focus of this volume enables standard theories of quantification to be challenged by languages other than those for which they were originally designed. The volume as a whole also uncovers a number of cross-linguistically common properties in the realm of quantification. The research presented here forms part of a growing trend towards formal study of understudied languages. This is a process which will ultimately lead us to a greatly enriched understanding of the universal human language faculty. The authors are all experts on their respective languages, most with many years field experience. All the authors have theoretical expertise in the area of quantification. This book will be of interest to semanticists and syntacticians working on quantification, to specialists in the languages discussed, and to semantic and syntactic fieldworkers. * This volume presents articles on quantification in (relatively) understudied languages * The authors are all experts on their respective languages