Browsing by Subject "Indigenous language"
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Item A descriptive grammar of Yongning Na (Mosuo)(2010-12) Lidz, Liberty A.; Woodbury, Anthony C.; England, Nora; Epps, Patience; Zhang, Qing; Thurgood, Graham; Crowhurst, MeganThis dissertation is a descriptive grammar of Yongning Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in southwestern China. The theoretical approaches taken are functional syntax and the discourse-based approach to language description and documentation. The aim of this dissertation is to describe the ways that the language's features and subsystems intersect to make Na a unique entity: analyticity; zero anaphora; OV word order; topic/comment information structure; a five-part evidential system; a conjunct/disjunct-like system that intersects with evidentiality and verbal semantics; prolific grammaticalization; overlap between nominalization and relativization and associated structures; representation of time through aspect, Aktionsarten, adverbials, and discourse context; and the Daba shamanic register.Item A grammar of Sierra Popoluca (Soteapanec, a Mixe-Zoquean language)(2009-12) De Jong Boudreault, Lynda Juliet; Zavala, Roberto; England, Nora C.; Epps, Patience; Crowhurst, Megan; Woodbury, Anthony C.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 methodology undertaken in this study. The grammar continues with a description of the phonology of SP, followed by an overview of the word classes, including verbs, nouns, relational nouns/postpositions, adjectives, adverbs, and numbers, and formative types. The bulk of this grammar is devoted to the morphosyntax of Sierra Popoluca, including nouns and nominal morphology, verbs and verbal morphology, and the mechanisms for expressing tense, aspect, mood, and modality. The grammar also describes the complex predicate formation strategies and sentence-level syntax. A compilation of interlinearized texts appears in the appendix. Sierra Popoluca is an agglutinating, polysynthetic, head-marking language with a complex verbal system. It has ergative-absolutive alignment and its grammar is sensitive to animacy and saliency hierarchies, evident in the case marking and `split' plural systems. Its constituent order is verb-initial, although word order is pragmatically determined. Sierra Popoluca has a number of strategies to form complex predicates, which include verb serialization, noun incorporation, and dependent verb constructions. The data available in this grammar contributes a body of data and descriptive analysis to broad theoretical areas of linguistics as well as existing research on the Mixe-Zoquean language family, languages throughout Mesoamerica, and especially the Gulf branch of the Zoquean family.