99 research outputs found
In collaboration with Luz Elena León Ramírez, Sebastián Fuentes Holguín, Bertha Fuentes Loya and other Choguita Rarámuri language experts
Synopsis:
This book provides the first comprehensive grammatical description of Choguita Rarámuri, a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in the Sierra Tarahumara, a mountainous range in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua belonging to the Sierra Madre Occidental. A documentary corpus developed between 2003 and 2018 with Choguita Rarámuri language experts informs the analysis and is the source of the examples presented in this grammar. The documentary corpus, which consists of over 200 hours of recordings of elicited data, narratives, conversations, interviews, and other speech genres, is available in two archival collections housed at the Endangered Languages Archive and at UC Berkeley’s Survey of California and Other Indian Languages.
Choguita Rarámuri is a highly synthetic, agglutinating language with a complex morphological system. It displays many of the recurrent structural features documented across Uto-Aztecan, including a predominance of suffixation, head-marking, and patterns of noun-incorporation and compounding (Sapir 1921; Whorf 1935; Haugen 2008b). Other features of typological and theoretical interest include a complex word prosodic system, a wide range of morphologically conditioned phonological processes, and patterns of variable affix order and multiple exponence. Choguita Rarámuri is also of great comparative/historical importance: while several analytical works of Uto-Aztecan languages of Northern Mexico have been produced in the last years (Guerrero Valenzuela 2006, García Salido 2014, Reyes Taboada 2014, Morales Moreno 2016, Villalpando Quiñonez 2019, inter alia), many varieties still lack comprehensive linguistic description and documentation
A grammar of Choguita Rarámuri: In collaboration with Luz Elena León Ramírez, Sebastián Fuentes Holguín, Bertha Fuentes Loya and other Choguita Rarámuri language experts
This book provides the first comprehensive grammatical description of Choguita Rarámuri, a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in the Sierra Tarahumara, a mountainous range in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua belonging to the Sierra Madre Occidental. A documentary corpus developed between 2003 and 2018 with Choguita Rarámuri language experts informs the analysis and is the source of the examples presented in this grammar. The documentary corpus, which consists of over 200 hours of recordings of elicited data, narratives, conversations, interviews, and other speech genres, is available in two archival collections housed at the Endangered Languages Archive and at UC Berkeley’s Survey of California and Other Indian Languages.
Choguita Rarámuri is a highly synthetic, agglutinating language with a complex morphological system. It displays many of the recurrent structural features documented across Uto-Aztecan, including a predominance of suffixation, head-marking, and patterns of noun-incorporation and compounding (Sapir 1921; Whorf 1935; Haugen 2008b). Other features of typological and theoretical interest include a complex word prosodic system, a wide range of morphologically conditioned phonological processes, and patterns of variable affix order and multiple exponence. Choguita Rarámuri is also of great comparative/historical importance: while several analytical works of Uto-Aztecan languages of Northern Mexico have been produced in the last years (Guerrero Valenzuela 2006, García Salido 2014, Reyes Taboada 2014, Morales Moreno 2016, Villalpando Quiñonez 2019, inter alia), many varieties still lack comprehensive linguistic description and documentation.
Contributor biographies
Choguita elder †Luz Elena León Ramírez was a master storyteller and an invaluable source of linguistic, cultural and historical knowledge. She contributed many narratives to the corpus, including procedural texts, historical narratives, descriptions of culturally relevant events in the community, and personal history from her childhood. She also collaborated in elicitation sessions and translating and annotating her own and other language experts' texts.
Bertha Fuentes Loya has authored narratives, and has contributed to the corpus as a consultant for elicitation sessions and has collaborated in the annotation of texts recorded with other language experts. She has shared her expertise about variation between Choguita Rarámuri and neighboring Rarámuri varieties. She is also an expert seamstress and authored several narratives and procedural texts about her art
Sebastián Fuentes Holguín is a passionate advocate for the language and one of the main leaders of the community-based initiative to document the cultural, historical and linguistic heritage of Choguita. He has authored several monologic narratives and ceremonial speeches and has participated as consultant and teacher in elicitation sessions.
A grammar of Choguita Rarámuri: In collaboration with Luz Elena León Ramírez, Sebastián Fuentes Holguín, Bertha Fuentes Loya and other Choguita Rarámuri language experts
This book provides the first comprehensive grammatical description of Choguita Rarámuri, a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in the Sierra Tarahumara, a mountainous range in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua belonging to the Sierra Madre Occidental. A documentary corpus developed between 2003 and 2018 with Choguita Rarámuri language experts informs the analysis and is the source of the examples presented in this grammar. The documentary corpus, which consists of over 200 hours of recordings of elicited data, narratives, conversations, interviews, and other speech genres, is available in two archival collections housed at the Endangered Languages Archive and at UC Berkeley’s Survey of California and Other Indian Languages.
Choguita Rarámuri is a highly synthetic, agglutinating language with a complex morphological system. It displays many of the recurrent structural features documented across Uto-Aztecan, including a predominance of suffixation, head-marking, and patterns of noun-incorporation and compounding (Sapir 1921; Whorf 1935; Haugen 2008b). Other features of typological and theoretical interest include a complex word prosodic system, a wide range of morphologically conditioned phonological processes, and patterns of variable affix order and multiple exponence. Choguita Rarámuri is also of great comparative/historical importance: while several analytical works of Uto-Aztecan languages of Northern Mexico have been produced in the last years (Guerrero Valenzuela 2006, García Salido 2014, Reyes Taboada 2014, Morales Moreno 2016, Villalpando Quiñonez 2019, inter alia), many varieties still lack comprehensive linguistic description and documentation.
Contributor biographies
Choguita elder †Luz Elena León Ramírez was a master storyteller and an invaluable source of linguistic, cultural and historical knowledge. She contributed many narratives to the corpus, including procedural texts, historical narratives, descriptions of culturally relevant events in the community, and personal history from her childhood. She also collaborated in elicitation sessions and translating and annotating her own and other language experts' texts.
Bertha Fuentes Loya has authored narratives, and has contributed to the corpus as a consultant for elicitation sessions and has collaborated in the annotation of texts recorded with other language experts. She has shared her expertise about variation between Choguita Rarámuri and neighboring Rarámuri varieties. She is also an expert seamstress and authored several narratives and procedural texts about her art
Sebastián Fuentes Holguín is a passionate advocate for the language and one of the main leaders of the community-based initiative to document the cultural, historical and linguistic heritage of Choguita. He has authored several monologic narratives and ceremonial speeches and has participated as consultant and teacher in elicitation sessions.
On reconstructing Proto-Bantu grammar
This book is about reconstructing the grammar of Proto-Bantu, the ancestral language at the origin of current-day Bantu languages. While Bantu is a low-level branch of Niger-Congo, the world’s biggest phylum, it is still Africa’s biggest language family. This edited volume attempts to retrieve the phonology, morphology and syntax used by the earliest Bantu speakers to communicate with each other, discusses methods to do so, and looks at issues raised by these academic endeavours. It is a collective effort involving a fine mix of junior and senior scholars representing several generations of expert historical-comparative Bantu research. It is the first systematic approach to Proto-Bantu grammar since Meeussen’s Bantu Grammatical Reconstructions (1967). Based on new bodies of evidence from the last five decades, most notably from northwestern Bantu languages, this book considerably transforms our understanding of Proto-Bantu grammar and offers new methodological approaches to Bantu grammatical reconstruction
Celebrating 50 years of ACAL
The papers in this volume were presented at the 50th Annual Conference on African Linguistics held at the University of British Columbia in 2019. The contributions span a range of theoretical topics as well as topics in descriptive and applied linguistics. The papers reflect the typological and genetic diversity of languages in Africa and also represent the breadth of the ACAL community, with papers from both students and more senior scholars, based in North America and beyond. They thus provide a snapshot on current research in African linguistics, from multiple perspectives. To mark the 50th anniversary of the conference, the volume editors reminisce, in the introductory chapter, about their memorable ACALs
Recommended from our members
DIRECTIONAL HARMONIC SERIALISM
This dissertation proposes a novel phonological framework, directional Harmonic Serialism, that synthesizes constraint-based, rule-based, and formal language theoretic approaches to phonology. I illustrate its advantages in the domains of feature spreading, quantity-insensitive footing, and autosegmental phonology. Specifically, I demonstrate that across these disparate domains, directional Harmonic Serialism makes empirical predictions that more tightly model natural language phonology than alternative theories and that it does so using fewer theoretical mechanisms. At a high level, the theory outperforms alternatives using a simpler, more restricted toolkit
Non-iterativity, Icy Targets, and the Need for Non-linear Representations in Feature Spreading
Vowel and vowel-consonant harmonies have been central to much linguistic theorizing over the last century. One prevailing theme in this work is the need for non-linear representations. Clements (1981) and Jurgec (2011) argue for the superiority of non-linear representations for the analysis of unbounded and bounded feature spreading, respectively. This paper modifies and extends the metrical analysis in Jurgec (2011) to provide an Optimality Theoretic account for three bounded harmonies, rounding harmony in Central Crimean Tatar, as well as ATR harmony in Bangla and Iny. In all of these patterns, a vowel undergoes harmony but does not further propagate the harmonic feature. The metrical analysis is then compared to analyses employing string-based and autosegmental representations
A grammar of Choguita Rarámuri: In collaboration with Luz Elena León Ramírez, Sebastián Fuentes Holguín, Bertha Fuentes Loya and other Choguita Rarámuri language experts
This book provides the first comprehensive grammatical description of Choguita Rarámuri, a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in the Sierra Tarahumara, a mountainous range in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua belonging to the Sierra Madre Occidental. A documentary corpus developed between 2003 and 2018 with Choguita Rarámuri language experts informs the analysis and is the source of the examples presented in this grammar. The documentary corpus, which consists of over 200 hours of recordings of elicited data, narratives, conversations, interviews, and other speech genres, is available in two archival collections housed at the Endangered Languages Archive and at UC Berkeley’s Survey of California and Other Indian Languages.
Choguita Rarámuri is a highly synthetic, agglutinating language with a complex morphological system. It displays many of the recurrent structural features documented across Uto-Aztecan, including a predominance of suffixation, head-marking, and patterns of noun-incorporation and compounding (Sapir 1921; Whorf 1935; Haugen 2008b). Other features of typological and theoretical interest include a complex word prosodic system, a wide range of morphologically conditioned phonological processes, and patterns of variable affix order and multiple exponence. Choguita Rarámuri is also of great comparative/historical importance: while several analytical works of Uto-Aztecan languages of Northern Mexico have been produced in the last years (Guerrero Valenzuela 2006, García Salido 2014, Reyes Taboada 2014, Morales Moreno 2016, Villalpando Quiñonez 2019, inter alia), many varieties still lack comprehensive linguistic description and documentation.
Contributor biographies
Choguita elder †Luz Elena León Ramírez was a master storyteller and an invaluable source of linguistic, cultural and historical knowledge. She contributed many narratives to the corpus, including procedural texts, historical narratives, descriptions of culturally relevant events in the community, and personal history from her childhood. She also collaborated in elicitation sessions and translating and annotating her own and other language experts' texts.
Bertha Fuentes Loya has authored narratives, and has contributed to the corpus as a consultant for elicitation sessions and has collaborated in the annotation of texts recorded with other language experts. She has shared her expertise about variation between Choguita Rarámuri and neighboring Rarámuri varieties. She is also an expert seamstress and authored several narratives and procedural texts about her art
Sebastián Fuentes Holguín is a passionate advocate for the language and one of the main leaders of the community-based initiative to document the cultural, historical and linguistic heritage of Choguita. He has authored several monologic narratives and ceremonial speeches and has participated as consultant and teacher in elicitation sessions.
Interacting (with) Morpheme Structure Constraints: Representational Solutions to Richness of the Base Problems in Optimality Theory
Diese Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit Morphemstrukturbeschränkungen und ihren Auswirkungen in der Optimalitätstheorie. Morphemstrukturbeschränkungen wurden als sprachspezifische Beschränkungen vorgeschlagen, die vor allen anderen phonologischen und morphologischen Prozessen auf der zugrundeliegenden Form applizieren und sich auf monomorphemische Domänen beziehen. Die Hauptthese dieser Arbeit ist, dass Beschränkungen über die zugrundeliegende Form kein notwendiger Bestandteil einer phonologischen Theorie sind; Beschränkungen über monomorphemische Domänen jedoch durchaus empirisch nachgewiesen werden. Hierarchische Morphoprosodische Struktur wird als eine prosodische Lösung für solche Beschränkungen vorgeschlagen. Die Argumentation steht auf zwei Säulen. In einer empirischen Studie, die auf einer Datenbank mit 229 Einträgen aus 140 Sprachen besteht, wird nachgewiesen, dass sich Beschränkungen über monomorphemische Domänen auf phonologisch abgeleitete Eigenschaften in diversen Domänen (Wurzel, Affix, Morphem) beziehen. Außerdem wird gezeigt, dass die Interaktion von Beschränkungen über monomorphemische Domänen mit anderen grammatischen Prozessen, nämlich Infigierung, Vokalharmonie und Ton, durch Hierarchische Morphoprosodische Struktur erklärt werden kann, nicht jedoch durch alternative Ansätze.:Acknowledgments i
List of Abbreviations vii
1 MSCs, CoMDs, and CoURs 1
2 Typology of Monomorphemic Domains in Phonology 23
3 The Domain Problem in Infixation 61
4 Trigger Asymmetries in Vowel Harmony 107
5 Richness of the Base Problems in Tonal Phonology 143
6 Discussion & Conclusion 187
Appendix: DoCoMD 21
Emergent phonology
To what extent do complex phonological patterns require the postulation of universal mechanisms specific to language? In this volume, we explore the Emergent Hypothesis, that the innate language-specific faculty driving the shape of adult grammars is minimal, with grammar development relying instead on cognitive capacities of a general nature. Generalisations about sounds, and about the way sounds are organised into meaningful units, are constructed in a bottom-up fashion: As such, phonology is emergent.
We present arguments for considering the Emergent Hypothesis, both conceptually and by working through an extended example in order to demonstrate how an adult grammar might emerge from the input encountered by a learner. Developing a concrete, data-driven approach, we argue that the conventional, abstract notion of unique underlying representations is unmotivated; such underlying representations would require some innate principle to ensure their postulation by a learner. We review the history of the concept and show that such postulated forms result in undesirable phonological consequences. We work through several case studies to illustrate how various types of phonological patterns might be accounted for in the proposed framework. The case studies illustrate patterns of allophony, of productive and unproductive patterns of alternation, and cases where the surface manifestation of a feature does not seem to correspond to its morphological source. We consider cases where a phonetic distinction that is binary seems to manifest itself in a way that is morphologically ternary, and we consider cases where underlying representations of considerable abstractness have been posited in previous frameworks. We also consider cases of opacity, where observed phonological properties do not neatly map onto the phonological generalisations governing patterns of alternation
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