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Category genesis in Chitimacha: A constructional approach
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The genesis of new lexical categories poses a challenge to theories of diachronic change: If there are no pre-existing words in the class to analogize to, how does the category arise? This paper shows that a constructional approach to category change successfully accounts for the genesis of a diverse class of preverbs in Chitimacha, an isolate of the U.S. Southeast linguistic area. It is shown that what enabled the creation of the preverb category was schematization across a variety of forms with similar properties, namely, a preverbal syntactic position and a directional semantics. Category genesis can therefore be viewed as simply a special case of constructionalization wherein schematization plays a crucial role.
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... In North American languages, one somewhat common closed class of words is the preverb category, word which form a semantic unit with their verb, and often indicate things like direction or aspect (Los et al. 2012: Ch. 1). 2 Chitimacha has a closed set of 10 preverbs, shown below in (6) (Hieber 2018). By contrast, Menominee (Algic) has a large open class of preverbs (Bloomfield 1962: 214 (Hieber 2018: 19) While open classes tend to be lexical ones and closed classes tend to be functional ones, this is just a tendency (Velupillai 2012: 115). ...
This chapter is a survey of word classes in indigenous North American languages, with the aim of providing an introduction to the study of parts of speech, and of highlighting the unique place and contribution of North American indigenous languages in this research. Section 2 defines lexical vs. grammatical and open vs. closed classes, and how these distinctions are realized in North American languages. Section 3 summarizes the prominent themes in word classes research in North America: 1) at what level a word is categorized (root, stem, or inflected word), 2) whether a given language distinguishes noun and verb, and 3) whether a given language has an adjective category. The chapter concludes that North American languages present serious challenges to the definition and status of word classes in linguistic theory, and that the development of distinct lexical categories in a language is not necessarily a given.
... A recent proposal (though not widely accepted) also suggested a long-distance genetic relationship with Mesoamerican languages (Brown, Wichmann, and Beck 2014). Numerous studies have examined various aspects of Chitimacha grammar and diachrony, including the development of its class of preverbs (Hieber 2014a(Hieber , 2018, its system of verbal person marking and agent-patient alignment (Hieber forthcoming), the structure of Chitimacha discourse (Hieber 2016a), and verbal valency and transitivity (Hieber 2016b(Hieber , 2017. ...
The history of the Chitimacha language is a remarkable story of cultural survival. This chapter tells a part of that story, discussing the interactions between Chitimacha and other languages in the Southeast prior to colonial contact, the persecution of the Chitimacha people under the French, the language’s documentation by early linguists and anthropologists, and finally its modern revitalization.
... This software was released in 2010 and is now provided free to every tribal member and is incorporated into the language curriculum at the tribal elementary school. The recent availability of digital copies of archival materials has also facilitated a wave of new research on the language (Weinberg 2008;Iannucci 2009;Brown, Wichmann & Beck 2014;Hieber 2018Hieber , 2019aHieber , 2019b. The revitalization team continues to collaborate with the author on a modern dictionary, with eventual plans for a pedagogical grammar as well. ...
Preprint of a chapter for The languages and linguistics of indigenous North America: A comprehensive guide, eds. Carmen Jany, Keren Rice, & Marianne Mithun.
... A recent proposal (though not widely accepted) also suggested a long-distance genetic relationship with Mesoamerican languages (Brown, Wichmann, and Beck 2014). Numerous studies have examined various aspects of Chitimacha grammar and diachrony, including the development of its class of preverbs (Hieber 2014a(Hieber , 2018, its system of verbal person marking and agent-patient alignment (Hieber forthcoming), the structure of Chitimacha discourse (Hieber 2016a), and verbal valency and transitivity (Hieber 2016b(Hieber , 2017. ...
The history of the Chitimacha language is a remarkable story of cultural survival. This chapter tells a part of that story, discussing the interactions between Chitimacha and other languages in the Southeast prior to colonial contact, the persecution of the Chitimacha people under the French, the language’s documentation by early linguists and anthropologists, and finally its modern revitalization.
Middle markers are characterized by a distribution halfway between grammar and the lexicon: with some verbs, middle marking encodes valency change, while with others it obligatorily occurs with no obvious synchronic motivation. Despite the existing cross-linguistic work on middle markers, their history is still largely unknown. In the typological literature, the standard view is that middle markers predominantly have their origin in reflexive markers, and that, in their development, it is invariantly the grammatical component that expands to the lexical component. In this paper, I challenge these assumptions based on the analysis of a sample of 129 middle marking languages. As I show, the sources and pathways whereby middle markers come about are much more numerous and varied than what has been reported in the literature. By taking a source-oriented approach, I also discuss how recurrent cross-linguistic trends in the distribution of middle markers can in part be explained by looking at their history.
The middle voice is a notoriously controversial typological notion. Building on previous work (e.g. Kemmer, Suzanne. 1993. The middle voice . Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins), in this paper I propose a new working definition of middle markers as inherently polyfunctional constructions which are partly associated with valency change in opposition to bivalent (or more) verbs and partly lexically obligatory with monovalent verbs. Based on this definition, the paper undertakes a systematic survey of 149 middle voice constructions in a sample of 129 middle-marking languages. Evidence from the sample shows that middle voice systems display a much richer variation in forms and functions than is reported in the literature. This richer empirical evidence challenges some of the mainstream views on middle marking, especially its purported connection with reflexivity and grooming-type events, and calls for an overall rethinking of the typology of the middle voice.
This paper describes the alignment system for verbal person-marking in Chitimacha, a language isolate of Louisiana. Using data from recently digitized versions of texts collected by Morris Swadesh in the 1930s, I show that Chitimacha exhibits a split alignment system with agent-patient alignment in the first person and nominative-accusative alignment in non-first persons. The agent-patient alternation is shown to cross-cut subjects of intransitives, objects and even subjects of transitives, and direct/indirect objects of di-transitives. The agent-patient system in Chitimacha is therefore sensitive not to transitivity but rather to the semantic categories of agent and patient, making it an exemplary case of semantic alignment. I also discuss evidence of the diachronic origins of the agent-patient pattern and show that it arose via a reanalysis of transitive verbs with impersonal subjects ("transimpersonals") as intransitive verbs with patientive subjects.
Aims and Scope This collection of original papers is a representative survey of recent theoretical and cross-linguistic work on reciprocity and reflexivity. Its most remarkable feature isits combination offormal approaches, case studies on individual languages and broad typological surveys in one volume, showing that the interaction of formal approaches to grammar and typology may lead to new insights and results for both fields. Among the major issues addressed in this volume are the following: How can our current knowledge about the space and limits of variation in the relevant domain be captured in a structural typology of reciprocity? What light can such a typology shed on the facts of particular languages or groups of languages (e.g. Austronesian)? How can recent descriptive and typological insights be incorporated into a revised and more adequate version of the Binding Theory? How do verbal semantics, argument structure and reciprocal markers interact? How can we explain the pervasive patterns of ambiguity observable in these two domains, especially the use of the same forms both as reflexive and reciprocal markers? What are the major sources in the historical development of reciprocal markers? This combination of large-scale typological surveys with in-depth studies of particular languages provides new answers to old questions and raises important new questions for future research. © 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved.
All languages have demonstratives, but their form, meaning and use vary tremendously across the languages of the world. This book presents the first large-scale analysis of demonstratives from a cross-linguistic and diachronic perspective. It is based on a representative sample of 85 languages. The first part of the book analyzes demonstratives from a synchronic point of view, examining their morphological structures, semantic features, syntactic functions, and pragmatic uses in spoken and written discourse. The second part concentrates on diachronic issues, in particular on the development of demonstratives into grammatical markers. Across languages demonstratives provide a frequent historical source for definite articles, relative and third person pronouns, nonverbal copulas, sentence connectives, directional preverbs, focus markers, expletives, and many other grammatical markers. The book describes the different mechanisms by which demonstratives grammaticalize and argues that the evolution of grammatical markers from demonstratives is crucially distinct from other cases of grammaticalization.
