Woodbury's A Reference Grammar of the Onondaga Language is the latest in a series of reference grammars and dictionaries of Iroquoian languages published by University of Toronto Press. As a critically endangered language, Onondaga is in dire need of reliable and comprehensive documentation not only to preserve human knowledge but also to aid revitalizaton efforts. This grammar not only meets these criteria; it sets the gold standard for reference grammars. The writing is clear, concise and elegant. It is useful not only to Iroquoianist scholars but to linguists in general for explaining detailed properties that are perhaps less well known outside of the Iroquoianist literature. The grammar goes further by explaining technical jargon, making it useful to novice linguists and language enthusiasts; however, it does not over-explain concepts with burdensome passages.
The introduction is short and fairly standard, but provides the reader with important details of Onondaga in general and of how the grammar was compiled. Most of the material is based on stories collected recently from a number of speakers, most of whom have, sadly, passed away. The recent stories were recorded from the 1970s to the 1990s. Older stories from the middle of the 20th century and documents from the late 19th century also inform this grammar, allowing for the possibility of historical studies on Onondaga. The introduction also covers what I consider the most useful aspect of this grammar: five-line glosses. Historically, grammars were made unreadable by inconsistent or absent glossing. I re-create one of the examples in (1) for the reader's benefit.Footnote 1 The advantage of this system of glossing is that it allows for idiomatic translations of short phrases in addition to entire utterances. For example, the first three orthographic words are grouped together into one semantic phrase with the meaning ‘every so often’. The fourth and fifth orthographic words form another semantic phrase meaning ‘again’. The effort involved in creating a grammar of this calibre cannot be overstated. The accomplishment is even more striking when one considers Woodbury's Reference Woodbury2003 dictionary, which accompanies this grammar. Indeed, Woodbury notes in several places where this grammar and her earlier dictionary complement each other.
Chapter two, “The Sound System”, discusses the sound system of Onondaga, including both synchronic and diachronic sound changes. Woodbury also discusses some dialectal differences between the Six Nations variety (spoken in Canada) and the Onondaga Nation variety (spoken in the US). Woodbury again fails to disappoint by including a detailed discussion on prosody, including pitch tracks created on Praat (Boersma and Weenink, Reference Boersma and Weenink2018).
Chapter three, “Parts of Speech”, is a short discussion on the parts of speech in Onondaga, including a comment on the thorny topic of wordhood. She then introduces the three parts of speech: verbs, nouns, and particles, giving a brief overview of the morphological properties of the verbs and nouns. Woodbury ends this chapter with a discussion of clitics; however, she eschews the difficult question of distinguishing between affixes and clitics.
Chapter four, “The Verb”, provides a detailed discussion of verbal morphology. Woodbury begins with a discussion of the terminology used in her grammar, noting how it differs from terminology used in the past, which readers may come across if they wish to pursue more in-depth studies in Iroquoian. This chapter is unsurprisingly the longest (190 pages out of a total of 480) given the complex verbal morphology of Iroquoian languages. Here, Woodbury gives an extremely comprehensive account of the allomorphy and combinatorial properties of the vast array of affixes found in Onondaga.
Chapter five, “Nouns and Nominal Expressions”, contains an equally comprehensive discussion of this topic. To the best of this reviewer's knowledge, Woodbury has covered all aspects of nominal structure known in the linguistic literature (but see the evaluation below). I note, though, that she makes a theoretical assumption (however well-founded) in referring to demonstrative + noun constructions as “two…nominals in apposition” (p.311).
The next two chapters depart from traditional grammars in the Americanist tradition. Chapter six, “Pro-forms”, discusses pro-forms in Onondaga, including personal pronouns, interrogative pronouns, indefinite and negative indefinite expressions, and demonstratives.
Chapter seven, “Syntactic Constructions”, discusses syntactic constructions in Onondaga. Historically, syntax has been short-shrifted in grammars of North American languages, so Woodbury's discussion is a refreshing change. As a discourse configurational language (Hale, Reference Hale1983), Onondaga does not possess many of the same syntactic properties as European languages. Woodbury discusses interrogatives, embedded questions, relative clauses (including headless relatives, internally-headed relatives and correlatives), locative and temporal clauses, modality, and quantification, among other properties.
The grammar contains two appendices. The first is a set of three stories, again using the five line gloss in example (1) above. The second appendix is a list of particles.
Critical Evaluation: As mentioned at the outset, this grammar sets the gold standard for reference grammars. Not only does it rely on a large database of contemporary stories, it also contains historical data allowing for studies on language change. The literature on previous documentary work is thoroughly comprehensive.
Traditional grammars in the Americanist tradition typically concentrate on phonology and morphology, with perhaps some notes on syntax, whereas Woodbury has an excellent chapter on syntax. Other grammars are organized according to the different functions in the language and describe how they are formed. Woodbury combines both approaches here. The first few chapters follow the Americanist tradition, and the syntax chapter has some discussion of the grammatical functions found in Onondaga. In short, the morphology chapters largely list what morphemes there are in the language, describe their morpho-phonology, and explain what meanings are found with their use. The syntax chapter does describe typical syntactic constructions such as questions and relative clauses, but also lists various grammatical concepts, and explains the necessary morpho-syntax. Thus, the interested reader can look up a particular morpheme, such as the stative suffix, to see its properties and what meaning it gives rise to. Conversely, the reader can look up a grammatical concept, such as negation, to see how it is expressed morpho-syntactically.
To take an example, the section on modality explains the technical aspects of modality with just enough information so that non-linguists can follow the discussion. Woodbury then describes how epistemic, deontic, and dynamic modality are expressed. In particular, a variety of particles and lexical verbs are employed, as Onondaga does not have modal verbs of the English variety.
Despite the praise the reader can shower on this reference grammar, I do note that there is no discussion of counterfactuals or of evidentiality. As Woodbury mentions, however, it is now virtually impossible to conduct further field work on Onondaga due to aggressive colonization, so these concepts may never be well understood in this language. There is also little to no discussion of intonational contours or of intonational correlates of declaratives and interrogatives, as discussed for example by Williams (Reference Williams2013) for the related language Cayuga. Given the continued access to recordings, it is hoped that this will form part of Woodbury's future research. Also, the otherwise excellent discussion of nominal structure lacks a full discussion of the nominal particle (ne’). It is glossed as ‘the’, but the semantics are not elucidated. A fine-grained semantic analysis, however, would require a field experiment along the lines of Matthewson and Burton (Reference Matthewson, Burton, Matthewson and Ryan Bochnak2015) and Clemens et al. (Reference Clemens, Coon, Graff, López, Morgan, Pedro and Polinsky2012), and, as mentioned such an experiment may not be possible.
These minor shortcomings (mostly due to current lack of opportunity to carry out the relevant field work) do not detract at all from the overall usefulness of this book to linguists of all stripes and to language specialists involved in documentation and revitalization of Onondaga. I whole-heartedely recommend this grammar.
