Browsing by Author "Lanz, Linda A."

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    A grammar of Inupiaq morphosyntax
    (2010) Lanz, Linda A.; Bowern, Claire L.
    This dissertation is a reference grammar of the Malimiut Coastal dialect of Inupiaq (ISO: ESI, ESK, IPK), an Eskimo-Aleut language of northwestern Alaska spoken by the Inupiat people. It complements existing descriptions of Inupiaq by filling gaps in documentation. With approximately 2000 speakers, mainly above 50 years of age, Inupiaq is endangered. Within the Inupiat community, there is a strong commitment to language documentation and revitalization. The current work aims to provide a comprehensive description of Inupiaq morphosyntax to the Inupiat and academic communities. This dissertation uses the standard Inupiaq writing system and IPA for all examples in the hope that by including both scripts, the work will be maximally useful to the Inupiat community, scholars, and other interested parties. After introducing the language and reviewing previous work, the dissertation describes Malimiut Inupiaq phonetics and phonology, nominal and verbal morphology, syntactic categories, wordhood, constituency, and other syntactic topics. A final chapter draws comparisons between Inupiaq and other Eskimo-Aleut languages/dialects and summarizes major findings. These include a previously undocumented phonological change in progress, the shift of /z/ (Inupiaq 'r') to American English /r/ in younger speakers and heritage learners. Several interrelated variables are involved, including age, Inupiaq literacy, and the influence of English. The dissertation also documents case stacking, such that demonstrsatives can take grammatical case twice, previously undocumented in Eskimo-Aleut. The discovery of case stacking on adverbs (non-arguments) is particularly exciting, challenging current theories that motivate case stacking via argument structure. Although eastern Inuit dialects have been extensively documented, many areas of Inupiaq grammar remain undocumented. This dissertation is the first to discuss a number of morphosyntactic topics specifically for Inupiaq, including argument status, clause-level and sentence-level constituency, types of predication, wordhood (phonological vs. morphological vs. syntactic), and clause combining. A real need to separate morphology and syntax in Inupiaq becomes evident. It is often assumed that because Inuit languages are predominantly suffixing languages---there is virtually no other morphological process-morphology and syntax are one and the same in these languages. However, clause combining and constituency---among other phenomena---demonstrate that purely syntactic phenomena exist in the language.
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    Diachrony of complex predicates in Japanese
    (Rice University, 2009-02-11) Lanz, Linda A.; Linguistics Department
    This paper examines two types of complex predicates in Japanese from a diachronic perspective. The two-fold purpose is bring more diachronic data into the dialogue on complex predicates and to evaluate the claim by Butt and Lahiri (1998) that light verb constructions are diachronically stable. Using Japanese data it is possible to test this hypothesis. While the serial verb construction has become more restricted with time, over the centuries the light verb construction [N(-ACC) suru] has remained stable and become dramatically more frequent. Using natural written data rather than constructed examples, I demonstrate that in previous stages of Japanese - namely Old Japanese and Classical Japanese - the SVC had fewer restrictions on internal order, transitivity mismatches were possible, and motion verb grammaticalization was less developed than Modern Standard Japanese. In contrast, the suru-type light verb construction has undergone no significant changes in any attested stage of Japanese other than increase in token frequency.