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Language ideologies generally refer to the kinds of cultural assumptions or beliefs that speakers hold about their OWN language: its relation to the world, its relation to their sense of self, its relation to other languages, and so forth (Silverstein 1979, Woolard 1998). But in the kinds of cross-cultural contact situations that linguists, anthropologists, missionaries, or other Christian aid workers often find themselves, language ideologies about OTHER peoples' languages can be just as important. Though cultural assumptions about language may change over time and across historical and social contexts, they never disappear, not even from professional linguistics. Here I look at some of the key language ideologies at issue when considering the relationship between SIL and endangered-language linguistics.
Georgian person-number affixes reflecting subject and object agreement coexist on verb stems. As a result of limited morphotactic space, in several contexts certain markers surface while others that are equally semantically motivated do not. Inflectional blocking, relying on general linguistic principles of specificity and analogy, accounts for surface verb forms in a novel, explanatory fashion. The implication for Georgian is that instead of employing inflection produced by syntactically relevant affixation rules, its verb morphology results from morphotactic constraints, blocking of potential affix combinations, and verb stem insertion into instantiated inflectional affix frames.
This paper provides an analysis of the syntax of Straits Salish, according to which these languages lack a noun/verb contrast at the word level. Main clauses consist of an initial predicate, minimally containing a lexical root, a functional head where valence [± TRANSITIVE:] is marked, and possibly a pronominal suffix marking an internal argument. The predicate is followed by a second position clitic string of inflectional elements, the subject pronoun and tense. Determiner phrases are derived subordinate structures, adjuncts to the main clause. We present evidence against a copular verb analysis as further substantiation of the lack of a noun/verb distinction at the lexical level. We identify certain properties of quantified contexts in Straits Salish which provide important evidence for our analysis of argument structure.