The Translation Paradox

The study of translation can shed crucial light on the extent to which thoughts that are first organized in one language can be successfully transferred through another, and thus on the nature and extent of language differences. Language requires that thoughts be selected, categorized, oriented, and combined, and each language places its own constraints on these processes, which are illustrated here with attempts to translate from the Native American language Seneca into English

How People Use Adverbial Clauses

Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1984), pp. 437-44

Information Flow in Seneca and English

Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1985), pp. 14-2

The Interplay of Syntax and Prosody in the Expression of Thoughts

Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Structure (1997

How Subjective Is the Subject?

This article re-examines the issue of grammatical relations in Mandarin Chinese in light of the results of recent large-scale typological research on grammatical relations (henceforth GRs) worldwide. Specifically, it discusses three syntactic operations and constructions that are cross-linguistically relevant to the definition of grammatical relations, namely relativisation, reflexivisation, and quantifier float. The study adopts a strictly language-internal typological approach and avails itself of natural linguistic data or sentences sanity-checked by native speakers. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, it explores the hypothesis that, in line with various other languages, GRs in Mandarin Chinese are construction-specific. Second, it proposes an alternative approach capable of explaining the conflicting evidence often pointed out in the literature on GRs and subjecthood in Mandarin Chinese

Academic Speaking

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The Seneca Amplification Construction

The polysynthetic morphology of the Northern Iroquoian languages presents a challenge to studies of clause combining. The discussion here focuses on a Seneca construction that may appear within a single clause but may also straddle clause boundaries. It amplifies the information provided by a referent, here called the trigger, that is introduced by the pronominal prefix within a verb or occasionally in some other way. The particle neh signals that further information about that referent will follow. This construction is found at four levels of syntactic complexity. At the first level the trigger and its amplification occur within the same prosodic phrase and the amplification is a noun. At the second level the amplification occurs in a separate prosodic phrase but remains a noun. At the third level the amplification exhibits verb morphology but has been lexicalized with a nominal function. At the fourth level the amplification functions as a full clause and neh serves as a marker of clause combining. Several varieties of amplification are discussed, as are cases in which the speaker judges that no amplification is needed. It is suggested that the typologically similar Caddo language illustrates a situation in which this construction could never arise, simply because Caddo verbs lack the pronominal element that triggers the construction in Seneca