draft of the Zapotec valence chapter

I finished and sent off my draft for the chapter on valence morphology in San Dionisio Ocotepec Zapotec today.  It is intended for a volume from Brill that Aaron Sonnenschein and Natalie Operstein are editing.

Here is the beginning of it.  Write me if you would like a copy of the draft.

Ni'yaj psych complements continued

In a previous post, I talked about the unusual verb ni'yaj in Copala Triqui, which is used to convey a psychological attitude by some participant in a text toward another participant.

The following example is interesting, since 'illuminate/shine'  isn't a psychological verb.  But in combination with ni'yaj, we get the reading 'It seemed to me as if his face was shining'.  Here the overlap with another sense of ni'yaj 'see'  is fairly clear, but not all psychological uses involve vision.

Another stranded accusative

In a previous post, I mentioned the possibility of stranding the accusative marker in a relative clause.  Here is another example from a text:

More Condition D in Triqui

Another example of a potential Condition D violation in Copala Triqui:

This may be more evidence that the 'think'  clause is syntactically subordinate, though semantically superordinate.  ('Went to the river...' is thus an insubordinate clause..)

resumptive pronoun after ro' topic in Triqui

In a previous post, I discussed topic marking and mentioned resumptive pronouns.  The following shows another example of a resumptive pronoun after the ro' topic in Copala Triqui.

Speakers in the Timucua texts

Here are two nice charts showing the different patterns of the distribution of bo and buo in two Timucua texts.

Two forms of the plural in the Confessionario

Two forms of the plural in the 1612 Catechism

As I said in a previous post, I think this pattern shows that there were different Timucua speakers who are the unnamed coauthors of these texts.

Different speakers in Timucua texts

I've been looking at the distribution of some variable parts of Timucua grammar for what they tell us about the speakers and dialects.

One tentative conclusion is that there are two sub-dialects represented in the religious materials.  One dialect has -bo consistently for the plural marker, while the other uses both -bo and -buo for the same morpheme.  Call the first one the BO dialect and the other the BUO dialect

Some documents are entirely BO.  For documents in the second dialect, we get a mix of the two.  In the 1612 Catechism, for example, we get about 60% bo and 40% buo.    In this respect, the Confessionario is an interesting case.  It is BO up to about folio 138, then switches to BUO until about 153, then reverts to consistent BO dialect.

These screenshots are from a little spreadsheet with the folio number and which variant appears.  (Y = bo, N = buo).

An interesting conclusion -- possibly not so surprising, if you think about the context.   Although Francisco Pareja is listed as the 'author' of both texts, clearly the Timucua in the two is different, so I would say that they have different, unnamed, Timucua co-authors.

Comparatives in Triqui, 2

In a previous post, I mentioned comparatives in Copala Triqui.

The following example shows the comparative doj between the two parts of the compound verb niha' rá 'be happy'.  Compare that with the example in the previous post (repeated below) which shows the doj after the second part of the verb compound.  I think this is because niha' rá and  'yaj suun are in different classes of verb compounds.

Comparatives in Triqui

I was interested by the following example of a comparative in Copala Triqui.   The general structure for these is

V/Adj doj... rihaan NP

where doj is the 'more' morpheme and rihaan NP is the standard of comparison.

What's intriguing here is that the doj appears after the second part of a verbal compound:

Relative clauses in Triqui

The following example shows a relative clause formed on the possessor of the subject 'one whose children believe in Jesus'.  It's interesting that there is no resumptive pronoun or other syntactic indication of the possession relation here -- though perhaps the fact that the possessor form of child appears is the signal of the relation.

Titus 1:6

by itself

It is interesting to me that both Triqui and English 'self'  have two logically distinct meanings
a.) 'X acting on X' meaning and b.) 'X acting without the agency of Y'

The second one is less common in Triqui, but here are two examples.  Are these adverbs?

Words of counsel for the Triqui people

Today we finished and sent off the final version of our occasional paper!

Nana̱ nagua̱n' rihaan nij síí chihaan'

Consejos para la gente Triqui

Words of counsel for the Triqui people

We spent the last year working with a native speaker of Copala Triqui on this.  He wrote the text himself in his language, and we worked to make the spelling uniform and to translate this in English and Spanish.  Because very few Triqui people know how to read and write their language, we had to work out consistent spellings for many words (using the previous work of Barbara Hollenbach on development of an orthography as a basis).

What we have finished at this stage is the ’community version’, intended primarily for Triquis.  We also should  have the ’linguist edition’, with interlinear glossing for the whole thing, along with introductions and notes, available fairly soon.

Here is an image of the cover

A PDF version is available at http://albany.academia.edu/GeorgeAaronBroadwell/Papers/1519735/Words_of_counsel_for_the_Triqui_people

The text is being published with an audio CD of the text in Copala Triqui, distributed through our Institute for Mesoamerican Studies at University at Albany.

Zapotec valence pairs

Working today on valence in San Dionisio Ocotepec Zapotec.  The problem in a lot of these languages is that there are so many different morphological relationships between any two members of a valence pair.

For this variety of Zapotec at least, there are at least the following:

1. Equipollent  (less transitive has a lenis initial C; more transitive has the corresponding fortis C
2. Less transitive derived from more transitive
1. d- replaces initial g-
2. y- replaces an initial C (usually g-, but sometimes another C)
3. bi- replaces tsi- or dzi- syllable
3. More transitive derived from less transitive
1. prefix gu- added to root
2. prefix or infix u- added to root
3. prefix s- or sa- added to root

Here is part of the chart that I am working on:

Preverbal adverbs in Triqui

In previous posts here and here, I talked about the adverbs that show up immediately after the verb in Copala Triqui.  I've recently been looking at a few that are in the class of immediately preverbal adverbs.  One such adverb is yo'o or 'o which means 'continuously' (it is homophonous with the numeral 'one').

2 Thess 1:4

Another adverb in this group is ve'é 'well', as in the following example:

     

Hollenbach on p. 253 of her sketch also has examples of the adverbs nanj 'thus' and two intensives uxrá and tiquij (both meaning 'a lot, very much') in the same preverbal position. 

I don't have examples in my data of tiquij in my corpus.  I do have many examples of uxrá, but most are postverbal instead of preverbal.

Complement structures in Triqui

I like the following example because it shows a contrast between two kinds of complement structures in Copala Triqui.   One type is

V_{[ASP x]} [_S  V_{[ASP x]}...] 

with matching aspect between the two verbs. Hollenbach calls these subject complement structures, which seems like a good name to me.

The other type is


V_{[ASP x]}  SUBJ_i [_S  V_{[ASP x]} SUBJ_i...] 

with matching aspect between the two verbs and coreference between the two subjects.  We might call these subject equi structures, remembering that in Triqui the second instance of the SUBJ is usually overt.

In the example below, ca'vee 'be possible' is a subject complement verb, while quisij 'succeed in doing'  is a subject equi verb:

2 Thessalonians 1:10

Another example of a subject-equi verb is nó xcúún 'should':

1 Cor 14:33

(More of Paul's sexism here!) Nó xcúún is a little different from sij 'succeed in', since the complement of nó xcúún seems to always be in the potential, regardless of the aspect of the main verb.  So it is subject-equi, but without the aspect-matching requirement.

Affirmative sentences in Copala Triqui -- a mysterious construction

A mystery for us as we were working on the Copala Triqui text Words of counsel for the Triqui people was a very frequent vaa ne at the end of many lines.

Vaa means 'exist, be, seem' and ne means 'and'.   Tonight I found a passage in B. Hollenbach's sketch of the language where she writes  'The verbs vaa32 'to exist' and uun1 'to become' often take a sentence of any type as a subject complement with no complementizer.  These verbs serve to affirm the truth of the complement sentence, and they can follow the complement as well as precede it' (p. 216).

So this seems to be the right analysis for examples like the following:

This confirms my belief that the answer to (almost) everything is somewhere in one of Barbara H's publications -- the trick is finding it!