This study is based on naturalistic speech samples produced by one child learning Cree as her first language (2;01-4;03) and presents the first investigation into the development of preverbs in the language. Preverbs are an optional class of morpheme which precede the lexical verb stem, dividing into grammatical, lexical and directional (deictic)…

This research brings new evidence on early lexical acquisition in Wichi, an under-studied indigenous language in which verbs occupy a privileged position in the input and in conjunction with nouns are characterized by a complex and rich morphology. Focusing on infants ranging from one- to three-year-olds, we analyzed the parental report of…

This dissertation explores aspects of Me'phaa morphosyntax, from verb roots to verb-initial word orders. I argue that patterns of agreement map directly onto the syntax of argument structure, which in turn feed the language's unique manifestation of ergativity. Me'phaa agreement morphology is richly complex, and I show that this is due, in part,…

Dictionaries of endangered languages represent especially important products of language documentation, in part because they are usually the most familiar and useful genre of linguistic representation to endangered language community members. This familiarity, however, can become problematic when it is accompanied by language ideologies that…

The Tlingit language, indigenous to Southeast Alaska and neighboring parts of British Columbia and the Yukon territory, is related to the Athabascan languages and the recently extinct language Eyak. Like Athabascan and Eyak, Tlingit verbal morphology is highly complex. The conjugation of Tlingit verbs is unpredictable in certain respects, making…

Taking up analytical issues raised primarily in Dixon (2000) and Dixon & Aikhenvald (2000), this dissertation combines descriptive work with a medium-sized (50-language) typological study. Chapter 1 situates the dissertation against a concise survey of typological-functional work on causative constructions from the last few decades, and…

Treatise presents a brief grammatical sketch of the extinct American Indian language, Narragansett. A comparison is made with the Massachusett language as summarized in the work by Ives Goddard and Kathleen Bragdon, Native Writings in Massachusett (1988). A Glossary of terms and bibliographic references are included. Two appendices are included:…

This dissertation is a comprehensive description of the grammar of Sierra Popoluca (SP, aka Soteapanec), a Mixe-Zoquean language spoken by approximately 28,000 people in Veracruz, Mexico. This grammar begins with an introduction to the language, its language family, a typological overview of the language, a brief history of my fieldwork, and the…

Many Mayan languages make use of a special dependent verb form (the Agent Focus, or AF verb form), which alternates with the normal transitive verb form (the synthetic verb form) of main clauses when the subject of a transitive verb is focused, questioned or relativized. It has been a centerpiece of research in Mayan morphosyntax over the last…

Intended to contribute toward the understanding of paragraph and discourse structure, this study is based on the Totonac language as it comprises the "most extensive and involved system of clauses" seen by the authors and because the generation of the 396 verbal types of this system from a kernel of 11 types is "very symmetric and…

Ten grammars of indigenous Bolivian languages are presented in these two volumes of Bolivian Indian Grammars. The data were gathered and analyzed by members of the Bolivian Branch of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, which has carried on linguistic investigations in Bolivia since 1955. The grammars are presented in the tagmemic model of Pike…

Revised version of a paper presented at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Northwest Anthropological Association, Portland, Oregon, April 1972; research supported by the National Museum of Canada, the Philips Fund of the American Philosophical Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. (DD)

Navajo and Quechua, both languages with a highly complex morphology, provide intriguing insights into the acquisition of inflectional systems. The development of the verb in the two languages is especially interesting, since the morphology encodes diverse grammatical notions, with the complex verb often constituting the entire sentence. While the…

Approximately 90 citations are included in this annotated bibliography on the Kiowa-Tanoan languages: Kiowa (Oklahoma) and Tiwa, Tewa, and Towa (New Mexico and Arizona). Both published and unpublished works are included. Among the sources are the following publications: American Anthropologist; Anthropological Linguistics; Bulletin of the Bureau…

The distribution of Hualapai auxiliary verbs "-yu" and "-wi" can not be explained only by the presence or absence of an object, or by the active or stative feature of the matrix verb. It can be explained in terms of transitivity, in that "-wi" corresponds to high transitivity and "-yu" to low transitivity of…