Fieldwork and Language Documentation

In this chapter, we describe a methodology and workflow for developing lexical resources for underdocumented languages in the context of language documentation projects dedicated to one or both of the following goals: (1) to create and distribute a dictionary to a user community; and (2) to create a multipurpose extensible lexical resource that forms an integral part of a language docu- mentation and is interdependent with other components of the project, including a text corpus and grammatical analyses. In particular, we describe a...

Quantity judgment tasks have been increasingly used within and across languages as a diagnostic for noun semantics. Overwhelmingly, results show that notionally atomic nouns (Who has more cats?) are counted, while notionally non-atomic nouns (Who has more milk?) are measured by volume. There are two primary outliers to the strict atomicity-tracking pattern. First, some nouns, like furniture, show primarily cardinality-based results in some studies, indicating atomicity, but nevertheless show systematic non-cardinality judgments in other studies, with comparison based instead on value...

Theories of allomorph selection differ in the extent to which they allow the realization of morphemes closer to the Root to be sensitive to the shape of more peripheral morphemes. In contrast to the full parallelism of classic Optimality Theory (OT), various current approaches posit that morphemes are realized one at a time (serially), beginning with the Root and proceeding outwards. This predicts that no phonologically conditioned outward-sensitive allomorphy should exist. In this chapter we discuss new evidence from Nez Perce that morpheme realization is partly, though in fact not...

The Nez Perce verb agrees with the subject and the object in person and number. This paper considers the full paradigm of verb agreement in transitive clauses, documenting a series of previously undescribed restrictions on the use of agreement affixes as well as extended uses of originally non-agreement morphology as part of the agreement system. Data is drawn from systematic elicitation of four transitive paradigms. Two full paradigms are presented in the appendix.