Browsing by Subject "Documentary linguistics"
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Item A grammar of Guna : a community-centered approach(2014-08) Smith, Wikaliler Daniel; England, Nora C.This dissertation is a descriptive grammar of Guna, a Chibchan language of Panama with an approximate 40,000 speakers. The aim of the dissertation is to provide a description of the language that is linguistically relevant and at the same time straightforward and readable for a wider audience that may include the community of Guna speakers. This work fills a gap that exists in the literature for Guna. Great work has been done about Guna in diverse areas and disciplines. However, as the Guna population seeks to become more involved in their own representation (Howe 2010), there exists a great need for a document that bridges the understanding of Guna linguistics with the community's efforts of language maintenance and revitalization. In order to accomplish this, chapters are written in such a way that topics can be easily located, linguistic concepts are fully explained, and the language used to describe specific linguistic phenomena is straightforward. The dissertation is organized as follows: Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the academic and cultural context in which the dissertation was written and the methodology used in data collection and writing; Chapter 2 describes the phonology of the language and explains different orthographies that have surfaced for Guna; Chapter 3 presents the roots/bases and the formatives that attach to them; Chapter 4 builds on the previous chapter to describe phrases that have nouns and modifiers as heads; Chapter 5 discusses verbal morphology; Chapter 6 gives a description of sentence formation, which includes different syntactic phenomena such as type of predicates, word order, and pragmatically determined word orders; Chapter 7 serves as a bridge between Chapters 6 and 8 as it describes serial verb constructions, structures with two verbs that function as one predicate; and Chapter 8 is an account of clause combinations in the language. Although Guna is still spoken and learned by children, its dwindling percentage of native speakers makes it an endangered language. Therefore, this grammar is a contribution to the field of linguistics and to the efforts of revitalization and maintenance within the community.Item Grammatical sketch of Teotepec Chatino(2011-05) McIntosh, Justin Daniel; Woodbury, Anthony C.; England, Nora C.Teotepec Chatino is a Zapotecan language of the Otomanguean stock, spoken in the Southeastern Sierra Madre, in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Although other varieties of the Chatino language family have been described - Panixtlahuaca (Pride, 1963; Pride and Pride, 2004), Yaitepec (Rasch, 2002), Quiahije (Cruz, E, 2004; Cruz, E. et al., 2008), Tataltepec (Pride and Pride, 1970; Pride, 1984), Zacatepec (Villard, 2008), Zenzontepec (Campbell, 2009; Carleton, 2000) - there are no previous descriptions of Teotepec Chatino. Among the many interesting features of Teotepec Chatino is an inventory of twelve lexical tones. These tones distinguish between lexical items and have grammatical func- tions. The basic word order is VSO, however the language exhibits the alternative orders of SVO and OVS. These orders have specific semantic and pragmatic functions. The language has aspectual prefixes and some derivational patterns. There is verbal and nominal com- pounding which plays an important role in the formation of complex concepts. Animate direct objects are optionally marked by 7įᴿ ‘to’. The presence or absence of this marker with nominal constituents encodes whether an object is alienably or inalienably possessed. Teotepec Chatino has a vigesimal number system - a common areal feature of other languages in the region. There is a complex set of motion verbs that encode spatial orientation and reference. There are several constructions that result in complex sentences. These include relative clauses, complement clauses, adverbial clauses and conjunctions. There are a number of interesting temporal adverbs that are used to define different time events. The description and analysis of these aspects of Teotepec Chatino is based on data gathered through elicitation and oral texts. This work is a preliminary sketch of the language and should not be considered exhaustive.Item The phonology and morphology of Zacatepec eastern Chatino(2015-05) Villard, Stéphanie; Woodbury, Anthony C.; England, Nora C; Epps, Patience L; Law, Danny; Sicoli, Mark AThis dissertation presents an analysis of the phonology and some aspects of the morphology of Zacatepec Eastern Chatino (ISO 639-3: ctz), an Otomanguean language of the Zapotecan branch spoken near the Pacific coast of the State of Oaxaca, Mexico. It is based on primary data obtained from fieldwork conducted by the author (from 2006 to 2013) in the community of San Marcos Zacatepec, district of Juquila, Oaxaca, Mexico. Zacatepec Chatino is only spoken in that small community of about one thousand inhabitants. There are only about 300 speakers left, all above 50 years old. This variety of Chatino finds itself in an advanced language shift to Spanish, and as a result its vitality status is considered severely endangered. The description of Zacatepec Chatino is important within the study of Chatino languages in general, as contrary to most other Chatino varieties, it conserves all non-final syllables of its roots. This fact makes it a centerpiece for the Chatino language puzzle as its transparent morphology tells the story of the evolution of more innovative Chatino varieties. Indeed, beyond simply revealing lost segments/morphemes, it provides polymoraic structures that host clear sequences of tones that are not discernable in the monosyllabic/monomoraic varieties. The phonological analysis begins with a presentation of the segmental sound system, including two of the three contrastive supra-segmental features: nasalization and vowel length. Nasal vowels and long vowels are described together with oral vowels whereas tone, is dealt with in detail in a separate chapter. Directly following the segmental analysis, a chapter is devoted to the phonotactics of the language. Tone, being the hallmark of Otomanguean languages, is an area of the phonology that is described in great detail. The tonal system is intricate as it involves four levels of pitch represented in five mora-linked tones and three unlinked (floating) tones arranged in many tonal sequences which become the signatures for lexical classes. Furthermore, polysyllabicity allows for many moraic shapes resulting in a variety of possible phonetic realizations of the tonal sequences which mark the tonal Classes. The other highlight of this dissertation is a chapter dedicated to the description of the inflectional system, an area revealed to be quite com plex at the morphological and the morphophonological level. Nevertheless, despite its prima facie maze of irregularities, this intricate inflectional system actually presents a high rate of predictability in its segmental (aspect prefixes) and tonal conjugation Classes. This chapter describes the different patterns of inflection (segmental and tonal) for three different parts of speech: the verb, the inalienable noun, and the predicative adjective. The last chapter is devoted to the description of the numerical system which is interesting because the numerical phrases do not always follow the tonal sandhi rules of the language, and often result in idiosyncratic tonal patterns. It is important to document and describe this ancient numerical system as the language is in advanced language shift to Spanish. Its usage is loosing ground very rapidly and usually, when speakers need to count or utter a number (especially one above 15), they code-switch to Spanish. This work is a first step towards a comprehensive documentation of Zacatepec Chatino, which as of today, includes a large corpus of natural discourse recorded within the community by native speakers (about 170 hours), a collection of transcribed and translated texts, and a lexicon and verb database with full paradigms for more than 300 verb roots. The corpus is archived with open access at the Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America, University of Texas at Austin, and at the Endangered Languages Archive, School of Oriental and African Studies, London.