The relevance of the concepts of local syntactic selection and constraints on locally selected dependents in modeling how arguments are syntactically realized has been virtually unchallenged and is assumed to be universal. In this article, we examine more closely these assumptions and ask whether there is anything invariant in the realization of arguments. We argue that the facts of Oneida, and Iroquoian in general, suggest the answer to this question is No. There is no use in Oneida for local selection of phrases realizing semantic arguments (and lexical records of this selection), and words are, as a result, functionally complete. We also argue that there is no use for a level of argument structure or any analogous notion in Oneida. The kinds of processes that justify positing such a level are systematically absent. The facts of Oneida suggest that there is less universality in the syntax/semantics interface (particularly when it comes to the realization of semantic arguments) than is typically assumed and that languages may vary widely in the way semantics is mapped onto syntax. We end with a formal model of the relevant fragment of Oneida within head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG).

The Eyak language of Alaska now has two aged speakers; Mandan has 6, Osage 5, Abenaki-Penobscot 20, and Iowa has 5 fluent speakers. According to counts in 1977, already 13 years ago, Coeur d'Alene had fewer than 20, Tuscarora fewer than 30, Menomini fewer than 50, Yokuts fewer than 10. On and on this sad litany goes, and by no means only for Native North America. Sirenikski Eskimo has two speakers, Ainu is perhaps extinct. Ubykh, the Northwest Caucasian language with the most consonants, 80-some, is nearly extinct, with perhaps only one remaining speaker. Here we might be accused of jumping the gun, prematurely announcing the extinction of a language, since—as I heard somewhere—two or three more speakers of Ubykh had reportedly been found. But what difference does it make in human history that a language became extinct in 1999 instead of 1989? What difference does it make if the youngest speaker is 90 or in fact 9? Only 81 years in the date of the inevitable extinction of the language, a mere moment in human history— though a crucial moment for linguists today, as we shall see.

In schools, from kindergarten through high school, the language of instruction was English. When students who had been taught in English left school, they were speaking English. When they married, they spoke English to their children. ‘Indians’ no longer spoke their native languages as their primary means of communication.

This was the perceived state of affairs in relation to the Hualapai language in the mid 1970s. Many members of the community thought that English was taking over their ancestral language and that their traditions were about to disappear. In response to this threat of rapid language decline, a long and tedious process of forming a community language team began, with the Hualapai Bilingual/Bicultural Program as its central force.

The scene is Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast, the eastern half of this Central American country. It is a multilingual region where, besides Spanish, English Creole and various indigenous languages are spoken by populations of speakers ranging from tens of thousands of Miskitu (Misumalpan) to thousands of Sumu (Misumalpan) to barely two dozen Rama (Chibchan) and a mere handful of Garifuna (Arawakan).

The time is the decade of the 1980s and of the Sandinista Revolution, during which the legal, educational, and social status of these coastal languages changed through the process of establishing an autonomy statute for the region, a development that is sometimes referred to as the second Sandinista Revolution. This Autonomy project was a response to the war situation that developed on the Atlantic Coast, as both indigenous and Creole people rejected the Sandinista Revolution in its original form.

This essay will deal with a special type of center devoted to the documentation and teaching of the linguistic traditions of contemporary Native American communities. In my remarks, I will concern myself with the needs that such a center would satisfy in North America—in particular the United States, with which I am most familiar, although some of what I will have to say applies in other parts of the world, of course. While centers possessing many of the qualities I wish to champion here exist in other parts of the world, an impressive example being the Centro Linguistico Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala, there is none that closely approximates this model in the United States.

[This paper (read at the International Congress of Americanists, Hamburg, 1930) attempts to present the phonetics of Chinook Jargon as now spoken by a few natives, to treat the essential phenomena of its structure, and to exhibit a text accompanied by an analysis.]

Linguists working in Guatemala in recent years have had the benefit of being able to work with an increasingly linguistically sophisticated, politically aware, and culturally concerned population. Mayas have been quite forthright about informing linguists about what they believe to be the proper sort of linguistics to do. In 1985, for instance, a group of Mayas participating in the VIII Mayan Linguistics Workshop in Antigua Guatemala called on linguists ‘not to contribute to the internal division of each Mayan language, not to promote or officialize Spanish borrowings in those languages, not to marginalize speakers of Mayan languages in the investigation of their own languages, and not to monopolize or reserve for themselves linguistic methodology and knowledge’ (Cojtí Cuxil 1990:3). It was perhaps a shock to some linguists, as it was to me, to realize that good will and good relations with the individual collaborators in our past research, a dedication to sound scientific principles of linguistic research, and even instruction in literacy and linguistics on the part of many of us were not enough to avoid rather severe criticism of our role in Mayan linguistics.

From the study of sign languages we know that the visual modality robustly supports the encoding of conventionalized linguistic elements, yet while the same possibility exists for the visual bodily behavior of speakers of spoken languages, such practices are often referred to as ‘gestural’ and are not usually described in linguistic terms. This article describes a practice of speakers of the Brazilian indigenous language Nheengatú of pointing to positions along the east-west axis of the sun’s arc for time-of-day reference, and illustrates how it satisfies any of the common criteria for linguistic elements, as a system of standardized and productive form-meaning pairings whose contributions to propositional meaning remain stable across contexts. First, examples from a video corpus of natural speech demonstrate these conventionalized properties of Nheengatú time reference across multiple speakers. Second, a series of video-based elicitation stimuli test several dimensions of its conventionalization for nine participants. The results illustrate why modality is not an a priori reason that linguistic properties cannot develop in the visual practices that accompany spoken language. The conclusion discusses different possible morphosyntactic and pragmatic analyses for such conventionalized visual elements and asks whether they might be more crosslinguistically common than we presently know.

Linguists typically celebrate the tension that plays between two realities of human linguistic knowledge, universality and diversity. But linguistic diversity is not something whose future can be taken for granted. Many local languages and cultures find themselves in great peril in this era, a fact well documented elsewhere in this collection.

In the following paragraphs I will be concerned with the idea that linguistic diversity is important to human intellectual life—not only in the context of scientific linguistic inquiry, but also in relation to the class of human activities belonging to the realms of culture and art.

The Saipan dialect of Chamorro displays certain transderivational relationships that hold optionally between complex words and the non-complex forms from which they are derived. These relationships are examined, and it is argued that phonological theory must either allow optionally-cyclic rule application, or else recognize a class of transderivational phenomena for which the cycle cannot account.

In this article we describe and develop an optimality-theoretic (OT) analysis of foot-level (secondary) and word-level (primary) stress in Nanti, a Kampa language of Peru. The distribution of stress in Nanti is sensitive to rhythmic factors, syllable quantity, vowel quality, and to whether a syllable is open or closed. The interaction of these independent variables produces a complex, multigrade stress scale married to an iterative stress system whose default preference is alternating, iambic rhythm. While each of the interacting factors in this system is familiar to phonologists, Nanti is special because the particular combination of influences and factors in Nanti contributes to a complexity of interactions that has not been documented in any other language to date.

This article examines the acquisition of noun classes in Tsez, looking in particular at the role of noun-internal distributional cues to class. We present a new corpus of child-directed Tsez speech, analyzing it to determine the proportion of nouns that children hear with this predictive information and how often this is heard in conjunction with overt information about noun class agreement. Additionally, we present an elicited production experiment that uncovers asymmetries in the classification of nouns with versus without predictive features and by children versus adults. We show that children use noun-internal distributional information as a cue to noun class out of proportion with its reliability. Children are biased to use phonological over semantic information, despite a statistical asymmetry in the other direction. We end with a discussion of where such a bias could come from.

In Lezgian, a Nakh-Daghestanian language, final and preconsonantal ejectives and voiceless unaspirated obstruents are voiced in certain monosyllabic nouns. This article offers acoustic evidence confirming that the two coda-voicing series are indeed voiced in final position. Based on comparative evidence, it is demonstrated that this phonetically aberrant neutralization pattern is the result of a series of phonetically natural sound changes. Such ‘crazy rules’ (Bach & Harms 1972) undermine any direct phonetic licensing approach to phonology, such as LICENSING BY CUE (Steriade 1997).

The Western Muskogean languages Chickasaw and Choctaw have a subject/oblique opposition in nominal case-marking and syntactic relations, despite their ‘active’ system of pronominal agreement. In both languages, case assignment may reflect the operation of productive relation-changing rules. These facts call into question the classification of Choctaw by R. Van Valin and W. Foley (e.g. 1980) as ‘role-dominated’. Restrictions on NP density (the number of nominal arguments per clause) may account for some of the syntactic differences between the more familiar ‘reference-dominated’ languages and languages of the Western Muskogean type.

In dementia in inflecting and agglutinating languages, morphosyntax is much better preserved than lexical access or pragmatics, but little is known about how dementia affects language in polysynthetic agglutinating languages with their complex verb morphology. Fortuitously, a series of narratives by a skilled Arapaho storyteller includes sessions from late in his life, when he was evidently dementing. Verb forms and clausal connectors in the speaker's Arapaho predementia and dementia narratives were sorted computationally and analyzed statistically. We found a decline in subordination and an increase in utterances missing verbs. There was a shift from using transitive active verb forms toward impersonal and passive verb forms, which require less pragmatic and syntactic computation to deploy, and a shift in subordination markers away from those requiring explicit consideration of the temporal relations between clauses.

Mayali has four genders and five morphological classes, with formal identity between the gender prefixes and four of the morphological class prefixes. Gender and morphological class are assigned according to different but largely overlapping semantic principles. We analyze these partially overlapping systems within the network morphology framework; an implemented model demonstrates that the analysis gives the correct forms for the majority of nouns in a basic lexicon, and further extends to understanding assignment in the avoidance register. Our account depends on recognizing two different types of default: normal case default, the expected outcome in a given domain, and exceptional case default, the last resort short of full lexical specification.

A complex morphological system for marking respect and social distance exists in the Nahuatl spoken in the Malinche Volcano area of Puebla and Tlaxcala, in Mexico. Principles for usage of the system are described on the basis of observation of 85 speakers in eleven communities. Usage in direct address is relatively stable in all communities. However, usage in reference, which apparently became highly elaborated during the colonial period, is being reduced in some of the modern communities. This seems to reflect the shift in the functional range of Nahuatl toward a usage manifesting indigenist solidarity, with prestige-bearing roles being increasingly encoded in Spanish.

Verbs in the Hopi language are noteworthy for their very rich and expressive development of verbal aspects and voices. I shall say nothing in this paper of the nine voices (intransitive, transitive, reflexive, passive, semi-passive, resultative, extended passive, possessive, and cessative); and of the nine aspects (punctual, durative, segmentative, punctual-segmentative, inceptive, progressional, spatial, projective, and continuative) I shall deal with only two. It may be noted that there are no perfective and imperfective aspects; in fact Hopi does not in any way formalize as such the contrast between completion and in-completion of action. Its aspects formalize different varieties of the contrast between point-locus and extent-locus of phenomena, indifferently in time or space, or in both. Hopi also has three tenses: factual or present-past, future, and generalized or usitative. Hopi verbs belong to seven classes or conjugations having slightly different inflectional systems. Class 1, the largest and most creative class, contains a few categories not found in the other classes, among them the segmentative aspect.

1. The Central Algonquian Languages form a group which, together with Eastern Algonquian, constitutes the Eastern-Central branch of the Algonquian stock. While the similarity between the Central Algonquian languages is evident, the exact grouping is doubtful.