Topics in Mohawk grammar.
Item
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Title
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Topics in Mohawk grammar.
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Identifier
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AAI8821089
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identifier
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8821089
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Creator
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Hopkins, Alice Woodward.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Sally McLendon
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Date
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1988
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Linguistics
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Abstract
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The interaction of parts of words with elements outside the word in polysynthetic languages challenges the traditional notion that words are the "building blocks" of syntax. The hypothesis of this thesis--based on a detailed phonological, morphological, and syntactic investigation of Mohawk, a polysynthetic North American Indian language--is that word boundaries are not barriers to syntactic processes. Data were collected during fieldwork at the Kahnawa:ke reserve in Quebec, Canada, in 1983.;In the model developed in this thesis, words are defined as phonological units: the smallest independent phonological units that have meaning. As such, they are part of a hierarchy of phonological units that coincide with various units on a grammatical hierarchy, depending on the language type. Words are only coincidentally grammatical units; that is, a word always coincides with some grammatical unit, but which grammatical unit or units it coinicides with depends on the language type. In Mohawk, a word may coinicide with a formative, a phrase, a clause, or a sentence. Criteria are given here for differentiating derivational (lexical) processes from inflectional processes--an essential task in a model where syntactic rules may ignore word boundaries, since only derived (not inflected) items are barriers to syntactic rules. This distinction is then used to analyze nominal and verbal affixation in Mohawk, and it is argued that position class and co-occurrence restrictions within the pre-pronominal prefix system can best be explained by postulating derivation "frames" into which inflectional formatives are infixed. Similarly, the distinction between derivation and inflection is used to clarify the nature of noun incorporation, which, it is argued, actually comprises two separate phenomena in Mohawk: lexical noun incorporation creates derived lexemes, whereas syntactic noun incorporation has grammatical and discourse-related functions. It is shown that syntactically incorporated nouns in Mohawk can serve as antecedents for anaphora and can be in phrasal construction with elements outside the incorporating verb, thus supporting the main hypothesis. Finally, three Mohawk narratives, with English glosses and formative segmentations, are given, providing naturally occurring, spontaneous utterances from which many of the examples in the text are taken.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
