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The Study of Nuuchahnulth Grammar: Consequences for a theory of language

AHRB Grant Project Code RG12323

Principal Investigator: John Stonham

This project will provide a detailed account of the grammatical structure of the Nuuchahnulth language of Vancouver Island to complement existing descriptions of the sound system (Stonham 1999). The project aims to establish a standard for the assembling and presentation of materials from little-studied languages and cultures.  Nuuchahnulth displays an unusually high degree of polysynthesis and a level of incorporation that goes well beyond any extant cases of this phenomenon. It is therefore essential to provide a detailed, comprehensive, and accurate account of the morphological phenomena of Nuuchahnulth if the full theoretical implications of the grammar are to be spelt out in the clearest possible terms.

A further major objective is to produce one of the most detailed dictionaries of any Native American language investigated to date. A challenge faced by both this and previous projects is the paucity of available lexical information for translating the texts. This dictionary will simplify this task and provide a framework for lexicography in neighbouring languages and information on related languages within the Wakashan family. It will aim to provide detailed cross-referencing to related forms, synonyms, and antonyms, details about names, loanwords, and forms from linguistically related languages where available and will contribute to our general understanding of the comparative lexicography of the family and further afield.

Research Questions: 

Numerous questions remain to be answered concerning our understanding of linguistic processes in natural language.  Many of these questions are posed by the grammar of Nuuchahnulth, for example (1) and (2) below, and results from this language may well provide solutions for much broader issues concerning human language and cognition, such as the extent of recoverability of information posed by the incorporation facts in (2).  One important question concerns reduplication, which takes on special properties in Nuuchahnulth, where it may be a concomitant of affixation. Thus:

 (1)             hitaqul                                  'face'
                   hita -qul                                   LOC -at the face

                   hihi:ta?ac'ul                            'foot'
                   hi- hita -'ac'ul                           Redup + V Length - LOC -at the foot

                   wikma:                                   'X is not Ö'
                   wik -ma:                                    not -3 INDIC

                   wiwi:k?ac'ul                            'bare feet'
                   wi- wik -'ac'ul                           Redup + V Length - not -at the foot

Note that no reduplication occurs with a suffix such as -qul 'at the face', but it does occur with the suffix -'ac'ul  'at the foot', irrespective of the root to which it attaches. Such forms of reduplication are complex and unexpected, and the possibility of multiple occurrences of reduplication of this type presents serious problems for most theories of morphology. A solution to this question would contribute towards resolving the issue of constraints vs. rules in morphology.

Another question arises from incorporation which, though well studied by a number of linguists for other languages, still presents challenges for linguistic theory. It is widely believed that only the heads of noun phrases may be incorporated. The following in Nuuchahnulth is a counterexample:

  (2)              ?ayasiik                   c'ihati         'make many arrows' [lit. many-make arrows]
                      __ -siik      [ ?aya   c'ihati ]          _ -make    many   arrow
                        |___________|

Such examples indicate that incorporation, which involves a long-distance dependency, need not involve a head, but may involve numerals, quantifiers, modifiers, etc., at least in Nuuchahnulth, and possibly in other languages (Greenlandic, for instance). This highlights the necessity for studying lesser-known languages in depth and argues for a syntactic treatment of incorporation.

Once this argument is made for Nuuchahnulth, it opens the door to extending a syntactic treatment to other cases as well. Other areas of Nuuchahnulth grammar exhibiting properties previously little known or unattested universally include (i) the complete absence of compounding, thought previously to be universal, (ii) the status of variable length vowels, the length depending on their position within the word, and (iii) the nature of word order in the language, which is sometimes VSO, sometimes VOS, and sometimes OVS.

Research Imperative and Context:

The long term significance of the work will be an advancement of our understanding of an important language of Native America. This will be the first modern in-depth study of any Wakashan language (Nuuchahnulth is a member of the southern branch) and will set a new standard for treatments of linguistic material, serving as an impetus to further linguistic studies of related languages. Ongoing research in this area has already generated interest among linguists and postgraduate students at the Universities of British Columbia, California at Santa Cruz, and Manchester, among others.

This research will be of significance not only to theoretical linguists interested in the properties of a little known language and their theoretical consequences for our understanding of human cognition, but also to cultural anthropologists, specialists in Native American studies, linguistic typologists and fieldworkers, and furthermore to the general public.

Research Methods:

The original materials which serve as the basis for the research consist of some 2,000 hand-written pages of field-notes gathered around the turn of the century by the linguist and anthropologist, Edward Sapir (for a sample page, click here). This material, housed in the Canadian Museum of Civilisation, has remained untouched for nearly a century, due in part to the dearth of Nuuchahnulth language expertise in the linguistic academic community.  What remains of Sapir's contributions are a handful of papers dealing with certain aspects of the language (e.g., Sapir 1924, 1929), and two volumes of texts co-authored with Swadesh, now out of print (Sapir & Swadesh 1939, 1955). The former volume is for the most part reliable, but the second is seriously flawed and more or less unusable by any but the most expert scholar of the language. Little else was published on Nuuchahnulth until the early 1970s, when Jacobsen, began research on the related Makah language (e.g., Jacobsen 1969, 1979, 1993, 1994). 

References

  • Jacobsen, William H., Jr. 1969. 'Origin of the Nootka Pharyngeals.' International Journal of American Linguistics (IJAL), 35;2: 125-153
  • ______. 1979. 'Noun and Verb in Nootkan.' Proceedings of the Victoria Conference on Northwestern Languages,  Victoria, B.C.: Provincial Museum. 
  • ______. 1993. 'Subordination and Cosubordination in Nootka: Clause Combining in a Polysynthetic Verb-Initial Languageķ. Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. (ed.) Advances in Role And Reference Grammar, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 235-274. 
  • ______. 1994. 'Nootkan Vocative Vocalism and Its Implications.' L. Hinton, J. Nichols, & J. Ohala, (eds) Sound Symbolism, Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, pp. 23-39.
  • Sapir, Edward. n.d. Fieldnotes on Nootka. In Boas Collection of American Philosophical Society.
  • ______. 1924. ėThe Rival Whalers, a Nitinat Story.ķ IJAL, 3:76-102.
  • ______. 1929. ėNootka baby words.ķ IJAL 5:118-119.
  • ______ & Morris Swadesh. 1939. Nootka Texts, Tales and Ethnological Narratives. Philadelphia & Baltimore, Md.: Linguistic Society of America.
  • ______. 1955. Native Accounts of Nootka Ethnography. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore and Linguistics.
  • Stonham, John. 1990. Current Issues in Morphological Theory. Doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, x, 253 pp.
  • ________. 1991. 'Hypocoristic Formation in Nootka.' University of Arizona Coyote Papers: Arizona Phonology Conference 3, edited by James Myers & Patricia E. Perez. Tucson: University of Arizona, 1991: 119-134. 
  • ________. 1994. Combinatorial Morphology. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Vol. 120 of Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. 1994, xii, 206 pp. 
  • ________. 1998. 'Numerals and Incorporation in Nootka.' Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages, pp. 384-394.
  •  ________. 1999. Aspects of Tsishaath Nootka Phonetics & Phonology. Munich: LINCOM Europa; LINCOM Studies in Native American Linguistics 32;  155 pp.
  •  ________. 1999. 'Noun Collocation in Nootka.' Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages,  pp. 231-250.
  •  _______ & S. M. Yiu. 2000. 'Woman-buy vs. Two-have: Two types of incorporation in Nootka.' Paper given at the Linguistic Society of America Annual Winter Meeting, January 8, 2000.
  •  Yiu, S. M. & J. Stonham. 2000. 'Good-stocked with Mussels: Incorporation on the edge.' Paper given at the Linguistic Society of America Annual Winter Meeting, January 8, 2000.

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