Browsing by Author "Gildea, Spike"
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Item A grammar of Matses(2003) Fleck, David William; Gildea, SpikeThis dissertation is a synchronic description of the grammar of the Matses language (also know as Mayoruna; Panoan family) as currently spoken by the Matses people living in Amazonian Peru and Brazil. The Matses language is spoken by 2000--2200 people, Amerindians who were first contacted in 1969 and continue to pursue traditional subsistence practices. This is the first attempt at a comprehensive description of the grammar of Matses; full-length grammars of no other Panoan language exist. Matses phonology, morphology, and syntax are the principal topics of this work. It follows a traditional format and is organized so that it can be used as a reference. The introductory chapter briefly provides information about classification of the language (particularly the Mayoruna subgroup), demography, physical setting, history, ethnography, literature review, and methodology. The second chapter describes Matses phonology, including an inventory of distinctive segments, syllable structure, morphophonology, prosody, sound symbolism, and borrowing. The next seven chapters are on morphology (an introduction to morphology, followed by six chapters describing the morphology of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, postpositions, and particles). All aspects of morphology are treated in these sections, including identification of word classes and subclasses, affixation, clitics, reduplication, and class-changing processes. The last three chapters are on syntax (phrases, one-clause sentences, and multi-clause sentences). The appendix contains three parsed texts. Matses has six vowels and 15 consonants. A word-level alternating rhythmic stress pattern characterizes the sound of the language. Morphologically, Matses stands between isolating and polysynthetic languages, and between agglutinative inflecting/fusional languages. It is the large number of morphological possibilities that is striking about Matses, not the length of its words. Interesting morphological properties include a complex system for coding evidentiality, an elaborate system of directional verbal suffixes, and adverb transitivity agreement. Constituent order is essentially free from syntactic restrictions. Subordination is achieved through expansion of syntactic slots though class-changing processes. Clause-chaining is a prominent feature of Matses discourse with sentences of up to ten clauses. Interesting syntax includes ergative-absolutive case marking alongside nominative-accusative person agreement, and three-place verbs with identical objects.Item A grammar of Tiriyo(1999) Meira, Sergio; Gildea, SpikeThe Tiriyo language has approximately 2,000 speakers (whose autodenomination is tareno [tare:nc], the term tiriyo or trio being of uncertain origin) who live in lowland South America, on both sides of the border between Brazil and Surinam. Like most other languages of the Cariban family, Tiriyo is chronically underdescribed. In the 117 years since Crevaux's first word list came out, very little has been written on the language: a few articles on specific points of phonology or grammar, two small tentative dictionaries, and two longer but incomplete sketches. This dissertation is intended as an effort to improve this situation by offering a more detailed description of the Tiriyo language based on extensive field work. It has a traditional format: after an introductory chapter on the Tiriyo people and previous research on the language, it begins with a description of the segmental and suprasegmental phonology, continuing on to the definition of word classes and the description of their morphology and arriving at the syntax, using what could be broadly defined as a functional-typological approach. A certain number of diachronic remarks and hypotheses are added when deemed appropriate; however, the synchronic descriptive goal is always the primary concern. After the basic description, a further chapter examines the lexicon, describing some formal regularities and also exploring its semantics via a closer look at some selected semantic fields. The appendices contain a collection of texts and a preliminary dictionary with grammatical information on every morpheme.Item A grammar of Wayana(2006) Tavares, Petronila da Silva; Gildea, SpikeWayana is a Cariban language spoken in northern Brazil, southern Surinam, and southern French Guyana by a total of around 900 speakers. The previous descriptive works on this language consist of a few vocabulary lists, a short grammar sketch, and a few articles on specific topics. This dissertation contributes to the documentation of the language by providing a more detailed description of most aspects of the Wayana grammar. The chapters range from a description of the language's phonological aspects to the morphology of the speech classes and the basic syntactic patterns. In addition, the appendixes include a collection of texts and a vocabulary list. Patterns discussed in this work include those of syllable reduction, in which words may undergo reduction of entire syllables; differences in the possessibility of nouns, which depend on semantic and cultural considerations; the complex system of spatial postpositions distinguishing features such as the position, path or goal of a trajector vis-a-vis its landmark; and a split ergative system in which no motivation for the split has yet been explained. The data used in this work were obtained through elicitation sessions and from recordings of spoken narratives.Item A reconstruction of Proto-Taranoan: Phonology and inflectional morphology(1998) Meira de Santa Cruz Oliveira, Sergio; Gildea, SpikeComparative and classificatory studies of Cariban languages, despite their long history (starting with Gilij in 1782), have been few and unsatisfactory, mainly due to the lack of necessary documentation of the languages in question. Based on a large amount of new descriptive data, as well as on published sources, the present work attempts to demonstrate the closer genetic relationship between a subgroup of three Cariban languages, Akuriyo, Tiriyo, and Karihona, the last two of which were considered to belong to very distant branches of the family in a still widely cited classification (Durbin 1977). This demonstration takes the form of a reconstruction of the main aspects of the segmental phonology and inflectional morphology (person, number, evidentiality, tense/aspect/mood) of the proto-language, which I propose to call Proto-Taranoan. A preliminary etymological dictionary, as well as some remarks on the history of the speakers, is also included.Item A reference grammar of Trumai(1999) Guirardello, Raquel; Gildea, SpikeTrumai is a genetic isolate language spoken in Brazil. This grammar describes the main aspects of Trumai, with hopes of contributing to typological studies. In describing and analyzing the linguistic data, I begin with synchrony, but I sometimes utilize internal reconstruction to help understand certain grammatical patterns. Trumai is basically an isolating language. There are few inflectional morphemes and words usually consist of a single morpheme. There are four open classes in Trumai: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Nouns and verbs clearly constitute two different classes; adjectives share some characteristics with nouns and verbs, but constitute a class on their own. The distinction between alienably and inalienably possessed nouns is manifested in several constructions, as is the distinction between humans, animates, and inanimates. As expected, the transitive verb phrase in Trumai contains the O and the V; surprisingly, the intransitive verb phrase contains the S, meaning that the Trumai VP is Absolutive-V. There are four verbs types in the language: Intransitive, Extended Intransitive, Transitive, and Extended Transitive. There are also auxiliaries, which can be subdivided in two sets: Aspect-Mood and Spatial-orientation (with the further subdivision of Body Posture and Directional auxiliaries). Trumai has rich syntax, although word order can change because of pragmatic factors. The case-system shows an Ergative-Absolutive alignment. With regard to grammatical relations, the traditional relations of 'Subject', 'Object', and 'Indirect Object' do not play a central role in Trumai grammar. The case-marking system and the syntax of the language consistently identify three argument types: Absolutive, Ergative, and Dative; each type contains a subset of the traditional relations. Other interesting facts observed in Trumai: (i) when a Transitive verb is causativized, both the causer and the causee are marked as Ergative; (ii) the main strategy for voice manipulation is argument suppression; (iii) there is a construction that could be classified as an instance of "possessor ascension"; (iv) the verb of a complement clause behaves as an inalienably possessed noun (more specifically, as a body part term); (v) there are multiple types of negative clauses in Trumai.Item Zauro'nodok agawayo yau: Variants of Akawaio spoken at Waramadong(2003) Caesar-Fox, Desrey Clementine; Gildea, SpikeThis dissertation is intended as a contribution to the study and understanding of how language is used among the Akawaio peoples of Guyana, South America. It is a first attempt, limited to one Amerindian village, Waramadong, a community that has not been studied very much. The study begins by analysing four Akawaio speech genres, tareng 'ritual healing chant', mire aburobodi 'praising rhymes for children', pandong 'story', and zegareme'no 'personal narratives', at the levels of both content and grammar. The first entails making anthropological, ethnographical, sociolinguistic and general cultural commentaries on the content and social context within which speech is performed. This is to investigate how the Akawaio speech genres are categorised and classified and in what ways they are performed, interrelated and connected to the wider domain of speaking in Akawaio society. The second is committed to analysing the observed linguistic variation in the speech genres at the levels of both dialectal variation across speakers and stylistic variation across the genres. The analysis takes a multidisciplinary approach, transcending traditional linguistic boundaries, and invoking both social and linguistic theories, especially in the analysis of Akawaio spirituality as a crucial component to understanding the native Akawaio view of speech genres. Thus, this study offers a primary description of a wider, extended view of what is known about language and culture in Akawaio society. This dissertation also seeks to rectify a serious situation, to provide an emphatic counterexample to the common image in linguistics and anthropological literature, where Amerindian communities are treated as largely homogenous groups. The premise behind most anthropological and linguistic studies is that everyone acts and speaks alike within these societies. One aim of this study is to replace this homogenized image of the Amerindian with a richer, more complex and internally diverse picture, of the kind shown here for Waramadong. Appendix B presents a small, but representatively diverse, selection of transcribed, translated, and linguistically annotated texts, representing a small subset of the overall collection of texts recorded for this study.