Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Athabaskan Languages: Perspectives on a Native American Language Family (review)

2003; Linguistic Society of America; Volume: 79; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/lan.2003.0151

1535-0665

Timothy Jowan Curnow,

Linguistics and language evolution

Reviewed by: The Athabaskan languages: Perspectives on a Native American language family ed. by Theodore B. Fernald, Paul R. Platero Timothy Jowan Curnow The Athabaskan languages: Perspectives on a Native American language family. Ed. by Theodore B. Fernald and Paul R. Platero. (Oxford studies in anthropological linguistics 24.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xii, 332. ISBN: 0195119479. $65.00. The papers in this volume were almost all originally presented at the Athabaskan Conference on Syntax and Semantics (Swarthmore College, PA, 1996). Eight of the thirteen chapters explicitly focus on Navajo; one on Ahtna, Slave, and Navajo; two on Koyukon Athabaskan; one on Apache; and one is historical. Melissa Axelrod’s paper examines the aspect/aktionsart system of Koyukon Athabaskan. She suggests that verbal actions are classified in a way that parallels the classification of nouns and also looks at how these systems are used in discourse. Leonard M. Faltz’s paper looks at typological features that are expected in a pronominal argument language (that is, in a language in which explicit NPs are adjuncts) and suggests that, in Navajo, syntactically visible constituents never denote fully unsaturated predicates. The way in which generic quantifiers interact with the interpretation of nominals and predicates in Navajo is the focus of Theodore B. Fernald’s paper, leading him to posit a distinction between individual-level and stage-level predicates. Ken Hale and Paul Platero look at the syntax and semantics of negative polarity expressions (such as ‘no-one’ and ‘not . . . anything’) in Navajo. They focus in particular on one strategy that involves the use of a verbal enclitic and what this means for poly-synthesis and nonconfigurationality theories. Dagmar Jung’s text-based study of Apache narratives shows that despite obligatory pronominal inflection on verbs, dialects of Apache have a robust SO word order, suggesting that the often assumed connection between adjunct NPs and pragmatic word order does not hold. Jeff Leer’s paper, ‘The negative/irrealis category in Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit’, begins with a synchronic discussion of the Athabaskan-Eyak negative and the Tlingit irrealis forms, then proceeds to a historical reconstruction of these and related items. Most descriptions of the Athabaskan verb rely on an analysis in terms of position classes. Joyce McDonough gives reasons for why this should be rejected as a model of speaker knowledge and, based on Navajo, develops an alternative ‘bipartite constituent’ model. Keren Rice looks at monadic verbs in Ahtna, Slave, and Navajo and the distinction between ‘unergative’ and ‘unaccusative’ verbs. She claims that the subject can be external or internal to the VP or incorporated in the verb, with subject position predictable on the basis of factors such as saliency, agentivity, animacy, and humanness. Carlota S. Smith analyzes the semantics of the Navajo verb base from a lexical-semantic point of view in terms of event structure, argument structure, and qualia structure. She suggests that close lexical analysis of specific morphemes is required, discounting morphological or position class membership of the morpheme. A functional analysis of word order changes from the basic Koyukon Athabaskan order of SOV is carried out by Chad L. Thompson. In addition to suggesting how such word order changes are used, he examines the problems this presents for theories of iconicity. MaryAnn Willie and Eloise Jelinek look at Navajo as a pronominal argument language where nominals are ordered by discourse (topic/focus) structure rather than grammatical relations. They focus particularly on anaphora, voice, and focus. The chapter by Robert W. Young and William Morgan, ‘The function and signification of certain Navaho particles’, originally published in 1948, is [End Page 651] essentially a listing of around eighty Navajo particles, each with some discussion of its meaning and rich exemplification in sentences. The final paper, ‘Sacred and secular issues in Navajo education’, is a report by the editors on a discussion of language and culture held at the conference. Rather than attempting to find solutions, it is essentially a discussion of the issues surrounding the teaching of Navajo...