LINGUIST List 17.1383
Fri May 05 2006
Diss: Lang Description/Syntax: Lovick: 'Agentivity a...'
Editor for this issue: Meredith Valant
<meredithlinguistlist.org>
Directory
1. Olga
Lovick,
Dissertation AbstractAgentivity and Participant Marking in Dena'ina Athabascan: A text-based study
Message 1: Dissertation AbstractAgentivity and Participant Marking in Dena'ina Athabascan: A text-based study
Date: 05-May-2006
From: Olga Lovick <Olgalithophile.com>
Subject: Dissertation AbstractAgentivity and Participant Marking in Dena'ina Athabascan: A text-based study
Institution: University of Cologne
Program: Department of Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2005
Author: Olga Charlotte Lovick
Dissertation Title: Agentivity and Participant Marking in Dena'ina Athabascan: A text-based study
Dissertation URL: http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/volltexte/2006/1727/
Linguistic Field(s):
Language Description
Syntax
Subject Language(s): Tanaina (tfn)
Dissertation Director:
Hans-Juergen Sasse
Fritz Serzisko
Dissertation Abstract:
This dissertation is concerned with strategies of participant marking innarrative texts in Dena'ina Athabascan, a language spoken in south-centralAlaska.
Dena'ina is a highly head-marking, polysynthetic language, and allreferents (subjects, direct objects and postpositional objects) are encodedby pronominal affixes to the verb stem, as opposed to free pronouns or nounphrases.
After a short introduction into the grammar of the language (chapter 1),the pronominal inventory as well as basic pronominal functions are explored(chapter 2).
It is then shown (chapters 3 & 4) that there is a significant asymmetrybetween the pronominal marking of first and second person referents (socalled discourse referents) and of third person referents. Thesedifferences are: Discourse referents are always overtly encoded by aprefix, while third person referents can be encoded by null-marking; also,first and second person are marked in a different position within the verbword than third person prefixes. First and second person prefixes displaycase-marking, third person prefixes do not. An interesting semanticdifference between prefixes encoding discourse referents on the one hand,and third person prefixes on the other, is that the latter group agree withtheir referent with respect to features such as animacy or humanness.Several examples are presented where the narrator makes use of thismechanism either to keep track of several referents without explicitelynaming them, or to express his or her attitude towards particularreferents, by either down- or upgrading them.
It is concluded that first and second person on the one hand constitute adifferent category than third person on the other hand. Third personprefixes act more like semantic class markers than like pronominals(chapter 5).
Last of all, the question of the interpretation of noun phrases ('who didwhat to whom') is addressed, seeing that there is no case marking todisambiguate. It is shown that Dena'ina employs marking patterns based onassumptions on the 'natural order of things': such a pattern indicateswhether a high-ranking referent acts on a low ranking one or vice versa.The listener then has to use world knowledge to decide which of thereferents is higher ranking than the other.
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