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Word and the Americanist perspective

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Abstract

Even though recently appeared reference grammars of lesser-known languages usually do pay attention to issues to do with wordhood, studies of the theoretical and typological import of wordhood-related questions in indigenous languages of the Americas are not numerous. This publication aims to address the challenges posed by individual phenomena found in the Americas to the received views of wordhood.

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Notes

  1. We grant that in many languages—not in the least American languages—the determination of the order of grammatical words, especially at the clausal level, is a matter of pragmatics rather than syntax. But the important point here is that the positional rules are not morphological in nature.

  2. In the claims, C refers to any layer in the prosodic hierarchy, the superscripts serve to distinguish different layers from each other.

  3. The first two relate to the very architecture of the prosodic hierarchy, and questioning these implies questioning the whole enterprise. We will discuss these types of more fundamental criticisms below.

  4. Nespor & Vogel use a generative model of syntax, but conclude that deep syntax, and in particular the postulation of empty categories, yields the wrong predictions, and so should be left out of consideration as far as their prosodic model is concerned.

  5. Some constructions with -achtig are lexicalized combinations and as such are analyzed as a single prosodic word, like reusachtig [røyzáxtəɣ] ‘enormous’ (lit. giant-like), where there is a single stressed syllable, following the main stress rule, and prevocalic voicing of the voiceless fricative /s/ to [z] before the suffix takes place. A similar pattern holds for some lexicalized compounds (see Booij 1999:116).

  6. They focus on function words because their problematic morphological status is one of the main targets of the paper, but the function word constraints are to a large degree word constraints (except maybe constraint 4).

  7. It can furthermore be argued that criteria like non-interruptability and extractability are contained in the criteria of host selectivity and positional freedom in the sense that elements with very strict host specifications are not expected to be interruptible and elements with rigid placement possibilities are not easily extracted from their original place.

  8. We are certainly not the first to compare the behaviour of V2 in Germanic in terms of parameters of wordhood. For instance, Wackernagel (1892) argued that finite verbs in proto-Indo-European were in fact clitics. Anderson (2005) argues that second-position clitics and V2 are both the result of an alignment operation positioning elements in the leftmost available syntactic position of an inflectional domain. Our position is not so much theoretical or diachronic, but rather descriptive.

  9. http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/entgegen_gegenueber_trotz.

  10. There is another variant te, after words ending in /a/, but this seems not to be a general morphophonological rule of the language, and rather idiosyncratic to this particular particle. Moreover, the particles are stressed independently and show no prosodic dependency.

  11. This does of course not entail that this issue has not been discussed in the theoretical literature for instance with respect to clitics (see e.g. Spencer and Luís 2012 for an overview), approaches based on co-phonologies and prosodically dominant versus recessive affixes (see e.g. Inkelas 1998) as well as in the literature on affixoids (Booij, p.c.—see also Stevens 2005; Booij 2010). Nevertheless, American languages have often been underrepresented in the more theoretical debates.

Abbreviations

a :

subject of transitive verb

abs :

absolutive

abst :

absential

acc :

accusative

av :

affix vowel

comp :

complementizer

compl :

completive

dat :

dative

dir :

direct

du :

dual

emph :

emphatic

erg :

ergative

evid :

evidential

foc :

focus

gen :

genitive

g-word:

grammatical word

ind :

indicative

intr :

intransitive

irr :

irrealis

loc :

locative

m :

masculine

n :

neuter

neg :

negative

nom :

nominative

ns :

nominal suffix

pfv :

perfective

pl :

plural

poss :

possessed

prf :

perfect

prog :

progressive

prs :

present

pst :

past

p-word:

phonological word

rel :

relativizer

sg :

singular

ta :

transitive animate

thm :

theme

top :

topic

tr :

transitivizer

tv :

theme vowel

ver :

veracity

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Geert Booij for valuable comments on this paper. All remaining errors are ours.

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van Gijn, R., Zúñiga, F. Word and the Americanist perspective. Morphology 24, 135–160 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-014-9242-z

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