Linguistics Theses and Dissertations
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Browsing Linguistics Theses and Dissertations by Author "DeLancey, Scott"
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Item Open Access A Grammar of Hakhun Tangsa(University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Boro, Krishna; DeLancey, ScottHakhun Tangsa is one of around eighty ethnic and linguistic communities called Tangsa or Tangshang. Hakhuns live mostly in Arunachal Pradesh, India, and in Sagaing Division, Myanmar. The number of speakers is estimated at around ten thousand. Hakhun is a Tibeto-Burman language, and it forms a subgroup with Nocte, Wancho, Phom, Konyak, Chang, and Khiamngan called Konyak or Northern Naga. Hakhun is a tonal language with twenty-two consonants, six vowels, and a simple syllable structure. Open word classes include Nouns and Verbs; property concept terms form a subclass of verbs. Noun roots are mostly monosyllabic, and most multisyllabic nouns are compounds. Nominal morphology includes prossessive prefixes and a set of semantically specific suffixes. Case is coded by postpositions. Verb roots are also mostly monosyllabic. A few verbs have suppletive stems. Verb serialization is common, and expresses complex events like resultative and sequential. A few grammaticalized verbs/elements contribute abstract meanings like phase, associated motion, causative, benefactive, etc. Typical verbal categories are expressed by independent particles. The most extensive and grammatically obligatory set consists of single syllable particles called operators, which express verbal categories like tense, mood, deixis, negation, inverse, and argument indexation. The typical argument indexation pattern is hierarchical. Deviations from this pattern is used to express certain pragmatic effects like affectedness and politeness. Non-verbal clauses may take overt copulas depending on tense and polarity. Most semantic distinctions, such as equation, property-concepts, quantification, simulation, and location are expressed by the nominal strategy. Existential and possession are expressed by a distinct strategy. Typical verbal clauses include intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive; less typical ones include weather condition, sensation-emotion, reflexive, reciprocal, and ‘need’ constructions. Person-based split-ergativity is seen in case marking, where first and second person singular arguments follow accusative, and the rest ergative alignment. Accusative alignment is also found in argument indexation in non-final clauses. The object alignment is indirective in case marking. Complement clauses include sentence-like, non-finite, and infinitive complement clauses. Adverbial clauses include various kinds of temporal clauses, temporal/conditional clauses, counterfactual, concessive, purpose, and substitutive clauses. Clause chaining (medial-final) is prevalent. Independent sentences are linked through tail-head linking and through connectives.Item Open Access Elements of Lushootseed Grammar in Discourse Perspective(University of Oregon, 2019-04-30) Zahir, Zalmai; DeLancey, ScottPrevious analyses have made insightful progress on how Lushootseed functions primarily based upon elicitation work and morphosyntactic observations. Much of this work is based upon a structural linguistic analysis. For years, this form of analysis has been the primary way Lushootseed has been presented and these insights have been helpful in understanding how Lushootseed functions. Indeed, much of what has been said about Lushootseed on this level is the basis for my analysis in this dissertation. However, there are elements of Lushootseed that do not fit well within this more traditional frame work and are not fully understood through just a structural linguistic analysis. This includes morphological elements, such as: the functions of the s- ‘nominalizer’; ʔu-, previously analyzed as a perfective marker; and =əxʷ, previously analyzed as marking a change of state. In addition, previous analysis on the diachronic Salish passive construction does not hold as a synchronic passive among four Central Salish languages. The methodology in this dissertation examines natural speech patterns and leans towards analyzing morphosyntactic elements in terms of focus and discourse marking. When certain Lushootseed constructions are analyzed using this approach, their distributions have promising results.Item Open Access A Grammar of Karbi(University of Oregon, 2014-06-17) Konnerth, Linda; DeLancey, ScottKarbi is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken by half a million people in the Karbi Anglong district in Assam, Northeast India, and surrounding areas in the extended Brahmaputra Valley area. It is an agglutinating, verb-final language. This dissertation offers a description of the dialect spoken in the hills of the Karbi Anglong district. It is primarily based on a corpus that was created during a total of fifteen months of original fieldwork, while building on and expanding on research reported by Grüßner in 1978. While the exact phylogenetic status of Karbi inside TB has remained controversial, this dissertation points out various putative links to other TB languages. The most intriguing aspect of Karbi phonology is the tone system, which carries a low functional load. While three tones can be contrasted on monosyllabic roots, the rich agglutinating morphology of Karbi allows the formation of polysyllabic words, at which level tones lose most of their phonemicity, while still leaving systematic phonetic traces. Nouns and verbs represent the two major word classes of Karbi at the root level; property-concept terms represent a subclass of verbs. At the heart of Karbi morphosyntax, there are two prefixes of Proto-TB provenance that have diachronically shaped the grammar of the language: the possessive prefix a- and the nominalizer ke-. Possessive a- attaches to nouns that are modified by preposed elements and represents the most frequent morpheme in the corpus. Nominalization involving ke- forms the basis for a variety of predicate constructions, including most of Karbi subordination as well as a number of main clause constructions. In addition to nominalization, subordination commonly involves clause chaining. Noun phrases may be marked for their clausal role via -phān `non-subject' or -lòng `locative' but frequently remain unmarked for role. Their pragmatic status can be indicated with information structure markers for topic, focus, and additivity. Commonly used discourse constructions include elaborate expressions and parallelism more generally, general extenders, copy verb constructions, as well as a number of final particles. Audio files are available of the texts given in the appendices, particular examples illustrating phonological issues, and phonetic recordings of tone minimal sets. Supplemental files are located at: https://hdl.handle.net/1794/13657Item Open Access Investigating differential case marking in Sümi, a language of Nagaland, using language documentation and experimental methods(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) Teo, Amos; DeLancey, ScottOne goal in linguistics is to model how speakers use natural language to convey different kinds of information. In theories of grammar, two kinds of information: “who is doing what (and to whom)”, the technical term for which is case or case role; and pragmatic information about “what is important”, have been assumed to be expressed by different means within a language. However, linguists have recently discovered that in numerous languages spoken in Australia, New Guinea, and South Asia, there are noun suffixes or enclitics that appear to simultaneously provide both case and pragmatic information. The existence of such systems suggests that our current theories of grammar need to be modified, though it is unclear how as we still know little about how these grammatical systems work. In this project, I looked at Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of North-east India, which has such a system of case marking. In this system, speakers do not consistently mark the subject of a transitive or intransitive sentence with an enclitic that conveys case information, but their choice depends on additional semantic and pragmatic factors. This was the first study of a Tibeto-Burman language to use a combination of new quantitative corpus methods with traditional linguistic fieldwork methods, including the recording, transcription, and tagging of spoken language, to identify semantic and pragmatic factors that are relevant to speakers’ choice of noun enclitic. In this study, some factors found to be relevant were: whether the sentence had a direct object or not; the animacy of the subject; and whether it was the first mention of a subject in connected speech or not. This was also the first study of a language with such a case system to include a perception study that investigated if intonation was used by native listeners to disambiguate whether a noun suffix was conveying either case or pragmatic information. This study showed that listeners were not using differences in intonation, but rather relied on the type of sentence the suffix occurred in to determine its meaning.Item Open Access An Investigation of Various Linguistic Changes in Chinese and Naxi(University of Oregon, 2012) Lu, Jung-yao; Lu, Jung-yao; DeLancey, ScottThis dissertation investigates the diachronic development of Chinese and Naxi, focusing particularly upon six linguistic puzzles that are likely to be associated with the various linguistic changes in most areas of the grammar, including sound/phonological changes, semantic/meaning changes, syntactic/sentence-structure changes, and contact-induced changes. This dissertation's primarily purpose is to provide new perspectives in order to solve these puzzles on the basis of typological and diachronic evidence. The dissertation will analyze cross-linguistic data from Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages in order to reconstruct various diachronic developments in Chinese and Naxi. The main body of the dissertation from Chapter II to Chapter V will examine the six linguistic puzzles successively, as follows: (1) tonal splits in proto-checked syllables and subgrouping of Loloish, (2) semantic development of RETURN in Chinese, (3) semantic development of TAKE in Chinese, (4) development of agentive passive markers in Mandarin, (5) definiteness and nominalization, relativization, and genitivization in Chinese, and (6) development of nominalization, relativization, and genitivization in Naxi. My approach is a rather elaborate attempt to pursue a new framework for comparative reconstruction of historical linguistics. In my study, comparative analysis of historical linguistics focuses on reconstructing ancient patterns based on diachronic records and/or typological data from several languages or dialects in a language group. The ultimate aim of the comparative reconstruction is to demonstrate the historical process of language change. A historical linguist, like a competent detective, must possess acute vision and strong reasoning skills to be able to reconstruct the whole story of language change, and admissible evidence is of upmost importance. In order to discover the solution to the aforementioned linguistic puzzles, the linguist must rely on three key types of clues: typological evidence, historical evidence, and linguistic theories. The basic assumption behind the comparative reconstruction is that the diverse synchronic, linguistic patterns in the same language group were diachronically derived from an identical origin. The common origin of these linguistic differences could be a sound, a meaning, a function word, a syntactic structure, etc., depending on the linguistic field in question. Between the origin and synchronic diversity is a series of diachronic processes. Therefore, the framework of the comparative reconstruction should consist of at least three basic elements: (1) synchronic diversity in a language group, (2) the original pattern or form of diversity, and (3) diachronic processes from the origin to the diversity.Item Restricted A Reassessment of the Genetic Classification of Miluk Coos(University of Oregon, 2012) Doty, Christopher; Doty, Christopher; DeLancey, ScottThis work presents the first in-depth analysis of Miluk Coos, a language previously spoken on the southern Oregon Coast. Miluk is normally classified as a member of the Oregon Coast Penutian group, a sub-branch of the Penutian phylum. However, Miluk demonstrates a number of affinities with the Salish language family. These similarities can be seen in a variety of domains. There are morphosyntactic features in Miluk which appear to resemble phenomena seen in Salishan languages. Additionally, some apparent cognates with Proto-Salish are discussed, including some which seem to exhibit regular correspondences.Item Open Access The Chepang language: Phonology, Nominal and Verbal morphology - synchrony and diachrony of the varieties of the Lothar and Manahari Rivers(University of Oregon, 2022-10-26) Pons, Marie-Caroline; DeLancey, ScottN/AItem Open Access Verbal Morphology of Amdo Tibetan(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) Tribur, Zoe; DeLancey, ScottThis dissertation describes the functional and structural properties of the Amdo Tibetan verb system. Amdo Tibetan (Tibetic, Trans-Himalayan) is a verb-final language, characterized by an elaborate system of post-verbal morphology that are limited to finite clauses and which encode information about the nature of the assertion. Aside from imperative mood, which is expressed by a different series of constructions, the finite verb constructions of Amdo Tibetan form a morphological paradigm expressing functions associated with the semantic domains of tense, aspect, (epistemic) modality, evidentiality and egophoricity. The data included in this study comes from three kinds of sources. The majority of examples are from my own field recordings, which include elicitations as well as spontaneous speech. I also make use of data from other linguistic publications, including two second language textbooks. My own data as well as these other sources reflect a high degree of dialectal (and register) variation which is characteristic of Amdo Tibetan. As will be apparent, my data shows a diversity of phonologies, morphosyntax, lexical items and even some functional categories. Consequently, this dissertation also serves as a cross-dialectal comparative study.