This thesis is a grammar of Nomlaki, a Wintuan language of northern California preserved exclusively through archival documents. Many early documenters did not consider Nomlaki sufficiently differentiated from its sister language Wintu to justify separate investigation. As a consequence, Nomlaki is the only Wintuan language without a grammatical description.
This grammar is a preliminary answer to this gap in the Californianist literature. This work is divided into eight chapters. The introduction includes an orientation of Nomlaki in its genetic context, a finding guide for its documentation, and a discussion of the limitations and methods involved in obtaining a grammatical description from archival records. The second chapter concerns Nomlaki phonetics, including studies on the vowel space, stress, voice onset time, locus equations for stops, and moment spectra for fricatives and affricates. The third chapter discusses Nomlaki phonology, including phonotactics, syllable structure, basic phonological processes, the behavior of loan words, lexical stress, and intonation. Chapters 4-7 discuss Nomlaki verbs, word classes, nouns, and syntax. Here I highlight several Nomlaki innovations, including an ablative case marker which is not present in either sister language or reconstructed for Penutian, its unique typology of the hortatives, the innovative use of the negative suffix -mena as a possibility marker, and semantic variations in the use of
‘particular’ and ‘generic’ noun marking. The final chapter presents a summary of conclusions and directions for future work.
This thesis is the first work to provide a detailed description of Nomlaki. While by no means complete, this work greatly expands not only our descriptive knowledge of Nomlaki itself, but of Wintuan and California language typology. The results not only confirm the close relation between Wintu and Nomlaki, but indicate key areas in which they differ. This in turn highlights Nomlaki as a unique language area, meriting independent study and consideration. Most importantly, this work enables higher quality learning for ongoing Nomlaki revitalization work.