Related Papers
Chickasaw Learner Varieties: A Preliminary Analysis of Adult Apprentices
Juliet Morgan
This paper offers a preliminary analysis of the learner variety of an adult learner of Chickasaw, a Muskogean language spoken today by around 65 fluent first language elders in Oklahoma. Since 2007, Chickasaw Nation has had a Master-Apprentice program, using the model created by linguist Leanne Hinton and the Native California Network in 1992 (Hinton 1997; 2001; 2008; 2011; Hinton et al. 2002). The Master-Apprentice program pairs elder fluent speakers (masters) with young adult learners (apprentices), who learn the language by doing and discussing everyday tasks together. The Master-Apprentice (M-A) pairs speak Chickasaw for two hours a day, five days a week. The goal of the program is to produce competent adult second-language speakers of Chickasaw who will go on to teach the language to future generations. The Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program (CLRP) requires that the apprentices make, at minimum, monthly recordings of their sessions with their masters and deposit these recordings with the CLRP. Using the CLRP's Master-Apprentice recordings, this paper analyzes the learner variety of one of the apprentices during their first year in the program. The paper focuses on the apprentice's usage of verbal morphology, specifically pronominal affixes, tense-aspect and modal suffixes, and negative constructions.
Ilittibaatoksali' 'We Are Working Together': Perspectives on our Chickasaw Tribal-Academic Collaboration
2013 •
Colleen Fitzgerald
Here we present research resulting from a tribal-academic collaboration between the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program (CLRP) and the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). This collaboration began three years ago, with a UTA service-learning trip to Ada, Oklahoma. The Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program is vigorously engaged in many activities to support language use by the remaining 70 or so fluent speakers. Communities facing such stark endangerment must address revitalization and documentation simultaneously, and in a way that maximizes resources. Our partnership addresses this challenge. This paper draws on the principles of Community-Based Language Research, defined in Czaykowska-Higgins (2009: 24) as a model that “not only allows for the production of knowledge on a language, but also assumes that that knowledge can and should be constructed for, with, and by community members, and that it is therefore not merely (or primarily) for or by linguists.” Benefitting ...
Morphology in the Muskogean Languages
Morphology in the Muskogean languages
2016 •
Colleen Fitzgerald
The indigenous languages of the Americas exemplify a number of uncommon typological patterns, especially in their morphology. Here, that rich morphology is illustrated via the Muskogean languages of the southeastern United States. Muskogean languages are agglutinative, but even more interesting and uncommon patterns emerge in an analysis of their morphology. These include subtractive morphology, suppletion, infixation, ablaut, and the use of suprasegmentals. These morphological patterns present considerable complexity. Inflected verbs in narratives and conversation often reflect more than one of the morphological processes. This morphological complexity also demonstrates characteristics of being nonlinear, of being prosodic yet not aligning with neat prosodic boundaries, of not having direct correspondence between grammatical categories and surface segments or suprasegmentals, or having more than one of those characteristics. Six of the seven Muskogean languages are still currently spoken by fluent first language speakers, and many of the tribal nations who represent these languages are involved in ongoing documentation and revitalization efforts, often in partnership with linguists. Thus, despite their highly endangered status, excellent existing documentation and new questions in research create an opportunity to collect even more intricate inflected forms that will enrich models of morphology and morphological theory while having broader impacts, like supporting tribal language revitalization.
Collecting texts in endangered languages: The chickasaw narrative bootcamp
2016 •
Colleen Fitzgerald
While data collection early in the Americanist tradition included texts as part of the Boasian triad, later developments in the generative traditionmoved away from narratives. With a resurgence of attention to texts in both linguistic theory and language documentation, the literature on methodologies is growing (i.e., Chelliah 2001, Chafe 1980, Burton & Matthewson 2015). We outline our approach to collecting Chickasaw texts in what we call a ‘narrative bootcamp.’ Chickasaw is a severely threatened language and no longer in common daily use. Facilitating narrative collection with elder fluent speakers is an important goal, as is the cultivation of second language speakers and the training of linguists and tribal language professionals. Our bootcamps meet these goals. Moreover, we show many positive outcomes to this approach, including a positive sense of language use and ‘fun’ voiced by the elders, the corpus expansion that occurs by collecting and processing narratives onsite in the...
Paradigmatic Deviations
Matthew Baerman
Defectiveness: typology and diachrony
Matthew Baerman, Greville G. Corbett
Oxford Handbooks Online
Language Obsolescence in Polysynthetic Languages
2017 •
Ekaterina Gruzdeva
Language affiliation and ethnolinguistic identity in Chickasaw language revitalization
2015 •
Jenny L. Davis
While the primary focus in language revitalization centers on fluent Speakers, such movements occur in a wider community of partial speakers, language learners, and nonspeakers. In this paper, I explore the linguistic and semiotic strategies within the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma that establish an ethnolinguistic definition of Chickasaw community membership, focusing on how such strategies are utilized by those who do not hold Speaker status. Specifically, I demonstrate how non-Speakers take up and reinforce ethnolinguistic language ideologies that connect them to the Chickasaw language through discourses of language affiliation via (1) a familial relationship to Speakers; (2) some level of Chickasaw language learning or activism; and/or (3) a familial relationship to the language learners and activists in the second category.
Interrogative Verbs in Takic
2012 •
Pamela Munro
A Google Scholar search for "interrogative verbs" brings up mostly references to verbs of asking, verbs with interrogative affixes, or verbs used in questions. A number of languages, however, have special verbs that include a semantic wh element in addition to their more typical question words. Verbs like this have not been extensively described, although Hagège (2003, 2008) suggests they are more common than most linguists realize: "Interrogative verbs," he writes, "can teach us many interesting things about certain relatively hidden, or unheeded, properties of language" (2008: 38). Hagège's broad survey turned up 28 languages with verbs of this type, including four from different North American indigenous language families. In this paper I'll consider interrogative verbs in four languages from the Takic subfamily of Uto-Aztecan (all from Southern California), which is unrelated to the languages surveyed by Hagège. I begin by explaining (in sec...
