Academic literature on the topic 'Uto-Aztecan family'

The internal structure of the Uto-Aztecan language family has been debated since the late 19th century, when the historical relationships among all of its major subdivisions were first recognized. Alexis Manaster Ramer’s identification in 1992 of a phonological innovation shared by languages belonging to the four northernmost subfamilies led to the acceptance of these languages as a genetic linguistic unit called Northern Uto-Aztecan, but no consensus has emerged regarding the organization into higher-level subgroups of the remaining five subfamilies. In this essay, I argue in support of a perspective, originally developed by Terrence Kaufman, that the languages in these subfamilies also constitute a genetic unit, Southern Uto-Aztecan, based on two shared, sequential innovations: *-n- > *-r- and *-ŋ- > *-n-. Key to my argument is the reconstruction of a Proto-Uto-Aztecan liquid phoneme with **[-r-] and **[-l-] as its allophones, which clarifies the diachronic relationships among reflexes of **-n-, **-ŋ-, and **-r- in the daughter languages. The model that I propose offers a parsimonious solution to several perennial issues in Uto-Aztecan historical phonology and a possible explanation for the absence of a liquid phoneme in the Numic languages.

AbstractThe classical historical linguistic method for establishing a phylogenetic subgroup requires evidence of shared innovation from a reconstructed protolanguage. In spite of the fact that UtoAztecan is one of the better-known American language families, there is surprisingly little work on the family within this framework. Instead, subgrouping hypotheses have emerged largely from the application of lexicostatistical methods. With the exception of two very clearly defined clades, Aztecan and Tepiman, Uto-Aztecan subgrouping remains controversial. In this paper I discuss issues in subgrouping that emerge from attention to shared phonological innovation, and compare subgroups that, in my view, can be fairly securely established on this basis with the subgroups suggested by the recent efforts in numerical-taxonomic subgrouping undertaken by the ASJP Consortium.

Previous research has noted that verbal suppletion for ergative number agreement (i.e. agreement with the subjects of intransitives and the objects of transitives) is widespread throughout the Uto-Aztecan language family and is therefore reconstructable to Proto-Uto-Aztecan (PUA) (Langacker, 1977). However, no previous works have systematically surveyed the attested forms of suppletion in these languages nor posited specific proposals for reconstructions of particular suppletive morphs back to PUA. We redress this lacuna by surveying the suppletive verbs in the various subgroups of Uto-Aztecan and assessing which of those are sufficiently widespread to reconstruct to PUA. We argue for specific PUA reconstructions for two verbal domains: die and kill, arguing that there were three distinct suppletive verb stems for marking these functions: *muku die.sg, *ko(i) die.pl, and *mɨɁa kill.sg. The plural form of kill in PUA was derived by adding a causative suffix *-ya to the plural stem for die, yielding *ko-ya. Other suppletive verbs in the family are not as easily reconstructable to PUA due to variation in attested forms, although some semantic functions seem to be widespread enough to be reconstructable. The PUA forms serving those functions would have been altered in different ways at different times by a lexical replacement process endemic to cases of strong suppletion, i.e. incursion (Juge, 2000). We also consider the issue of potential areal contact involving suppletion patterns in the areas where Uto-Aztecan languages are spoken, finding limited but suggestive evidence for possible areal effects involving suppletion for verbal number agreement.

Northern Paiute is a member of the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It is spoken across the Great Basin in the western United States – from Mono Lake in California, on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, through western Nevada and into southeastern Oregon and southwestern Idaho, as well as in a discontinuous region in southeastern Idaho by the Bannock. There are, according to Golla (2011), about 300 first-language speakers of Northern Paiute. In this illustration, we describe the language's Mono Lake variety.

The origin of the words $lsquo;cacao$rsquo; and $lsquo;chocolate$rsquo; and their use in the reconstruction of the early history of Mesoamerica, remain very controversial issues. Cambell and Kaufman (1976, American Antiquity 41:80–89), for example, proposed that the word $lsquo;cacao$rsquo; originated from Mixe–Zoque languages, thus possibly representing Olmec traditions. According to this argument, other Mesoamerican languages, including Nahuatl, borrowed the word as a symbol of prestige and Olmec influence. Other researchers claim the word $lsquo;chocolate$rsquo; represents a more recent neologism, a possible Maya–Nahuatl hybrid, due to the late appearance of the word in central Mexico's Colonial sources. We refute the putative Mixe–Zoque origin of $lsquo;cacao$rsquo; and provide linguistic evidence to propose that $lsquo;cacao,$rsquo; like $lsquo;chocolate,$rsquo; is a Uto-Aztecan term. Analysis of these words highlights general and particular evolutionary trends that originate from the Uto-Aztecan language family. In addition, we show that these two words were initially used as descriptive terms to refer to the shape of the plant's bean and the techniques of drink preparation. Etymological evidence verifies the use of a Mayan term for cacao as early as the Classic period (fourth century a.d.). This early appearance of the term in Mayan and the later diffusion of the Nahua word throughout all of Mesoamerica correlate with additional data to support the conclusion that Teotihuacanos spoke Nahuatl.

This dissertation is an application of the framework of Distributed Morphology to the morphosyntax of Chemehuevi, an endangered Southern Numic language of the Uto-Aztecan family. Following one of the central claims of DM, I argue that word formation in Chemehuevi happens in the syntax and provide evidence for this claim from the formation of lexical categories, as well as from the morphosyntax of the Chemehuevi causative verbs. I frame my discussion of lexical categories around the Root Hypothesis (Marantz 1997, Arad 2005), a notion that there are no underived nouns, verbs, or adjectives in the grammar, but roots that receive interpretation and assignment to a `part of speech' depending on their functional environment. I show that Chemehuevi nouns and verbs are formed when roots are incorporated into nominal or verbal functional heads, many of which are overtly represented in the language. I also demonstrate that there is no distinct class of adjectives in Chemehuevi, and that roots with adjectival meanings are derived into stative verbs or nominalizations, depending on their function.My discussion of predication in Chemehuevi centers around the previously unexplained distribution of the enclitic copula -uk, which under my analysis is viewed as an overt realization of a functional head Pred (based on Baker 2003), which is obligatory in the formation of nominal and adjectival, but not verbal predicates.Another major theme of the dissertation is the notion that word-formation from roots differs from word-formation from derived words, known as the Low vs. High Attachment Hypothesis (Marantz 2000, Travis 2000, etc.). This approach explains the differences between compositional and non-compositional word formation by the distance between the root and functional head(s) attached to it. On the basis of Chemehuevi causatives, I show that causative heads attached directly to the root derive words that exhibit morphophonological and semantic idiosyncrasies, such as allomorphy and availability of idiomatic meanings, while high attachment heads derive words that are fully compositional. This locality constraint on interpretation of roots is explained in terms of phase theory, and I present evidence from Chemehuevi showing that what constitutes a phase may be subject to parametric variation.Each chapter of the dissertation contains a section for non-linguistic audience where I provide a summary of the main points in non-theoretical terms and connect them to practical applications for the purposes of language learning and revitalization.

Varieties of headless relative clauses in the Uto-Aztecan language Southeastern Tepehuan (O’dam) are discussed, together with two related constructions: wh- interrogative clauses and headed relative clauses. O’dam encodes relative clauses using two strategies: nominalization and finite clause formation. Unlike most of the Uto-Aztecan family, O’dam uses the nominalization strategy only in ritual speech. Elsewhere, the language uses the general subordinator particle na to introduce all types of embedded clauses: adverbial, completive, and relative. This mode of subordination is typologically interesting for the Uto-Aztecan family because it results in an innovative strategy: finite clauses instead of nominalization. O’dam distinguishes between headed and headless relative clauses. Unlike headed relative clauses, headless relative clauses in O’dam lack a nominal head and require a wh-word. Two main varieties are attested: free relative clauses (maximal and existential, but not free choice) and light-headed relative clauses.