Fieldwork and Language Documentation

A note on Nez Perce verb agreement, with sample paradigms.

Amy Rose Deal
2015

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.

Towards a Theory of Subsegmental and Subfeatural Representations: The Phonology and Typology of Nasality

Myriam Lapierre
2021

CLA updates

December 13, 2021

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

On Wednesday and Friday of last week, we hosted five Achumawi visitors who consulted linguistic field notes and sound recordings related to Achumawi (Palaihnihan; CA). The visit was the last of those sponsored by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival this semester.

Interaction and satisfaction in φ-agreement

Amy Rose Deal
2015

A probe H interacts with feature F by copying F back to H. A probe H is satisfied by feature G iff copying G back to H terminates further probing for G by H. In this short paper, I introduce the distinction between interaction and satisfaction and give an argument that interaction and satisfaction features need not be the same. A probe may interact with the entire phi-set even though it is only satisfied by one particular phi-feature. Empirical evidence comes from complementizer agreement in Nez Perce, where the C probe interacts with all phi-features but is only satisfied by the...

Compositional paths to de re

Amy Rose Deal
2018

I argue that attitude reports de re arise compositionally via two distinct LF mechanisms. One mechanism allows the res to remain inside the embedded clause syntactically, and does not treat the res as an argument of the attitude verb semantically (Percus & Sauerland 2003, Ninan 2012). The other involves the res semantically serving as an argument of the attitude verb, and syntactically occupying a distinctive res position external to the embedded clause (Heim 1994). I show that both LF mechanisms are made use of by a single natural language, Nez Perce, and that Nez Perce allows...

Vague predicates, crisp judgments

Amy Rose Deal
Vera Hohaus
2019

Nez Perce is a language with a dedicated comparative morpheme and crisp judg- ments in its comparatives, but with no means to express differential measurement in its com- parative. These data can be captured by two different types of analyses: either Nez Perce has a negative setting of the Degree Semantics Parameter ([±DSP]) (Beck et al., 2009), along with a comparative operator that allows manipulation of context (Klein, 1980), or it has a positive setting of said parameter, but the comparative operator does not provide a slot for a differential degree argument. We show that the “...

Third readings by semantic scope lowering: prolepsis in Tiwa

Virginia Dawson
Amy Rose Deal
2019

Tiwa (Tibeto-Burman; India) attitude reports allow for proleptic objects, base-generated in the matrix clause but semantically related to a bound pronoun in the embedded clause. Unlike prolepsis in German (Salzmann, 2017b) and Nez Perce (Deal, 2018), which only allow for classic de re readings of the proleptic object, Tiwa prolepsis supports both classic de re and third readings. We provide an analysis that derives third readings via semantic scope lowering, an analytical relative of semantic reconstruction, and consider cross-linguistic implications.

Countability distinctions and semantic variation

Amy Rose Deal
2017

To what extent are countability distinctions subject to systematic semantic variation? Could there be a language with no countability distinctions—in particular, one where all nouns are count? I argue that the answer is no: even in a language where all NPs have the core morphosyntactic properties of English count NPs, such as combining with numerals directly and showing singular/plural contrasts, countability distinctions still emerge on close inspection. I divide these distinctions into those related to sums (cumulativity) and those related to parts (divisiveness, atomicity, and...

Classification of Guébie within Kru

Hannah Sande
2018

Guébie, a Kru language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire, is currently doubly classified within Eastern Kru according to Ethnologue (Lewis et al. 2013). It is listed as a dialect of two distinct subgroups, Bété and Dida. This double classification is clearly problematic, and this paper provides the initial work towards addressing the correct classification of the language. Here I compare the phonological and syntactic properties of Guébie with surrounding Bété and Dida languages in order to determine its relatedness to each subgroup. I conclude that Guébie is more closely related to Vata, a Dida...

Cross-word morphologically conditioned scalar tone shift in Guébie

Hannah Sande
2018

This paper presents data bearing on two key issues in morphophonological theory: 1) the domain of phonological evaluation, and 2) the item- versus process-morphology debate. I present data from Guébie (Kru) [Côte d’Ivoire] showing that imperfective aspect is exponed by a scalar shift in surface tone, which can affect either the tone of the inflected verb, or the subject noun phrase. There are four tone heights in Guébie, and the first syllable of a verb can underlyingly be associated with any of the four tones. In imperfective contexts only, that initial verb tone lowers one step on...