North America: polysynthesis

1. North America: polysynthesis

2. America • North America • Mesoamerica • South America • North America • No large political units (until recently) • Several waves of migration • Large genetic density • About 750 тthousand speakers

3. The largest and the most important families • Eskimo-Aleut / Eskaleut • Na-Dene • Incl. Athabaskan (Navajo…) • Algic • Incl. Algonquian • Iroquoian • Siouan (Lakota…) • Salish • Wakashan • Uto-Aztecan • Muscogran • Hokan?, Penutian? • …

5. Some features(except for the main one) • Phonology • ejectives, lateral consonants • occasionally - tones • Mainly head marking (but occasional double marking & head marking) • Alignment: • accusative • ergative • active (semantic alignment) • inverse

6. Active alignment • Koasati(< Muscogean)

7. Inverse alignment

8. Some features(except for the main one) • Weak noun/verb distinction • «Verbs» are regularly lexicalized as nouns. • Mohawk (Iroquiean) – Mithun 1996 • In Salish and Wakashan languages every “noun” may appear as a predicate and every “verb” may appear as an argument. (Cp. with Philippine, Circassian) • Nii-chah- • nutl=Нутка

9. Polysynthesis • New World vs Old World • P. Duponceau: It is impossible to resist the impression which forces itself upon us, that we are among the aboriginal inhabitants of a New World. We find a new manner of compounding words from various roots, so as to strike the mind at once with a whole mass of ideas; a new manner of expressing the cases of substantives, by inflecting the verbs which govern them; a new number (the particular plural) applied to the declensions of nouns and conjugation of verbs; a new concordance in tense of the conjunction with the verb. We see not only pronouns, as in the Hebrew and some other languages, but adjectives, conjunctions, and adverbs combined with the principal part of speech and producing an immense variety of verbal forms

10. “Combining ideas”within a single word • Duponceau 1819: Native American languages “unite a large number of ideas under the form of a single word” • “Additional” ideas? • incorporation • affixes with “lexical” meaning

11. “Combining ideas”within a single word • Incorporation • Mohawk (Baker 1996) • NB: Sometimes incorporation allows the simultaneous appearance of a free NP (and even its indexation). Caddo (Mithun 1984:866) wayah hdk-k 2uht- 2iP-sa ?. a.lot PROG-grass-be.grow-PRoG 'There is a lot of grass.'

12. “Combining ideas”within a single word • Affixal verbs in Eskimo • Lexical suffixes in Salish

13. “Combining ideas”within a single word» • Adverbial affixation

14. Holophrasis • Lieber 1853: Holophrasis = the expression of a proposition with a single word • “слово-предложение” in the Soviet linguistics • N. Evans & H.-J. Sasse 2002: “...a prototypical polysynthetic language is one in which it is possible, in a single word, to use processes of morphological composition to encode information about both the predicate and all its arguments, for all major clause types [...] to a level of specificity allowing this word to serve alone as a free-standing utterance without reliance on context” • Implication: polypersonal indexing

15. Morphological complexity • E. Sapir: The scaleanalytic > synthetic > polysynthetic • J. Greenberg: Synthetic index> 3 • Eskimo?? ≈ 3,72 Navajo (Kibrik2005) ‘He is looked at’ • What about dependent marking? • Complexity of a word or complexity of a morphological structure?

16. Complexity of morphological structure? • Standard Average Athabaskan template (Kibrik 1995) -18 proclitic -17 (b) Oblique [postpositional object] + (a) preverb [postposition] -16 various derivational -15 reflexive Accusative [direct object] pronoun (Navajo, Hupa) -14 iterative -13 distributive -12 incorporate (Slave, Sarcee, Ahtna) -11 number (Hupa, Slave) -10 Accusative [direct object] pronoun

17. Complexity of morphological structure? • Standard Average Athabaskan template (Kibrik 1995) -9 3 person Nominative [deictic subject] pronoun -8 transitivity decrease (Navajo, Hupa) -7 qualifier -6 inceptive -5 qualifier -4 conjugation -3 mode -2 1/2 person Nominative [subject] pronoun -1 transitivity indicator [classifier] 0 root +1 mode/aspect suffix +2 enclitic

18. Polysynthetic morphology • An alternative approach to the Athabaskan morphology • Rice 2000: The place of a morpheme is determined by its semantic contribution (scope). • W. de Reuse: A specific kind of morphology • The place of a morpheme is determined by its semantic contribution • Morphology that is most similar to syntax • Productivity (!) = the possibility of constructing words in the course of speech • Morphology of this kind is found in many languages… • Yet in polysynthetic languages it is very “active”.

19. Polysynthesis as a complex morphosyntactic phenomenon • R. Van Valin Jr., M. Baker inter alia: • Polysynthetic languages combine non-trivial features and constructions which are at first glance independent of each other. • This is not likely to be by chance. • Hypothesis: The most important parameter is the possibility of the morphological expression of arguments. • Cross-reference instead of agreement.

20. Cross-reference • Cross-reference may have more pronominal values than agreement

21. Polysynthesis as a complex morphosyntactic phenomenon • Baker 1996: The (macro)parameter of polysynthesis • Incorporation • Free NP ommission • Nonconfigurationality (word order, free anaphora, “discontinuous constituents”) • The lack of non-morphological reflexives, adnominal quantifiers, infinitives • Morphological causative • The possessum agreeing with the possessor • Internally-headed relative clauses • …

22. Polysynthesis as a complex morphosyntactic phenomenon • Baker 1996: Baker 1996: The (macro)parameter of polysynthesis • The lack of non-morphological reflexives, adnominal quantifiers, infinitives • Adverbial quantifiers (A-quantifiers) instead of adnominal D-quantifiers Mohawk (Baker 1996) • Internally-headed relative clauses: Southern Tiwa [bi-k’uru-tha-ba-ʔi] i-kʼeuwe-m 1sg.s/iii.o-dipper-find-pst-sub iii.s-old-prs ‘The dipper I found is old.’

23. Polysynthetic languages as a heterogeneous class • No criteria which could determine the class of olysynthetic languages precisely. • Fortescue 1994: Polysynthetic prototype NB: Some features are doubtful (a) Noun/adjective incorporation. (b) A large inventory of bound morphemes (but restricted number of stems). (c) The verb a minimal clause. (d) Pronominal markers on verbs (subject/object) and nouns (possessor). (e) Adverbial elements integrated into verbs. (f) Numerous morphological ‘slots’. (g) Productive morphophonemics and resultant complex allomorphy of bound and free morphemes. (h) Non-configurational syntax. (i) Head-marking (or double marking) type of inflection..

24. Polysynthetic languages as a heterogeneous class • Languages may be more or less polysynthetic. • Hence one may think of polysynthetic properties for non-polysynthetic languages as well. • Different polysynthetic features indeed may be related to each other. • But this relation grows gradually (the development of polysynthesis as a diachronic phenomenon).