This project continues our efforts to make a lasting record of Halkomelem, a First Nations language of British Columbia, through fieldwork with the fifty remaining fluent speakers of Hul'q'umi'num', the Vancouver Island dialect. Our goal is to record stories, preserving them in digital audio or video format, and then to transcribe and translate them. Our corpus of texts will provide a basis for our on-going analysis of the structure of Hul'q'umi'num', including topics such as reference tracking, voice and valence, the expression of NPs, and other discourse-related phenomena.
This project continues our efforts to make a lasting record of Halkomelem, a First Nations language of British Columbia, through fieldwork with the fifty remaining fluent speakers. Our goal is to record stories, preserving them in digital audio or video format, and then to transcribe and translate them. These stories will augment our sizeable corpus of texts currently in various stages of processing. In addition, our corpus of texts will provide a basis for our on-going analysis of the structure of Halkomelem. Our current focus is on grammatical categories that the speaker manipulates to express his/her viewpoint on the situation. These include not only categories such as tense, mood, and spatial deixis but also noun features, such as number, diminution, and gender.
This project focuses on the discourse structure of Halkomelem Salish, a First Nations language spoken in the vicinity of Vancouver and Victoria, British Columbia, through fieldwork with the one hundred remaining speakers. Halkomelem is an endangered language and its body of oral literature will not be preserved for future generations unless it is recorded from the last few fluent speakers. We videotape stories, preserving them in digital format, and transcribe and translate them with the assistance of native speakers. Over the last thirty years, we have collected a sizeable number of texts, which are at various stages of processing. The texts provide a corpus for research on topics such as reference tracking, voice and valence, the expression of NPs, and other discourse-related phenomena.
This project will develop a data base of over 600 verb stems in Hul'q'umi'num' (Vancouver Island Halkomelem), a Central Salish language. Verbs are classified by their semantics, as revealed by the range of affixes with which they combine. Some key questions that we seek to answer are: How many different types of roots are there with respect to transitivity? Can parallel treatments be given to other constructions that seem to involve levels of transitivity, such as passives, antipassives, reflexives, and causatives? How many levels of transitivity are there? How do they map to each other? What levels correspond to overt transitive morphology? How is transitive morphology layered? How do the levels of argument structure map to transitive inflectional positions? The overt marking of transitivity, the variety of tests for class membership, and the rich evidence for inflectional transitivity make Halkomelem a well-suited language for the investigation of these questions.
The focus of this project is diminutive words (e.g. mim'ne' 'little child',
sqwiqwmi' 'little dog, puppy', sxixne' 'little foot') in Hul'q'umi'num'
(Vancouver Island Halkomelem). Diminutives express smallness, and also
convey endearment and humility. Not all nouns have diminutive forms, and
we will explore the limits of this phenomenon to see what factors are
at play. So far, diminutives have been recorded for eighty nouns of several
semantic types, including persons, animals, body parts, clothing, personal
possessions, and tools. Also, Salish languages, like several other native
languages of North America, exhibit diminutive verbs and adjectives. Gerdts
and Hukari (Halkomelem, Lincom Europa, in press) analyze this as a form
of agreement that is sensitive to the semantic class and transitivity
of the predicate.
The morphology of Salish languages is notoriously complex, and diminutive
formation is no exception. Diminutives may involve reduplication, glottal
stop insertion, glottalization of resonants, and ablaut of vowels (e.g.
e to i). Diminutives combine with other forms, including plurals, imperfectives,
statives, and even other diminutives. Combinations raise an interesting
issue for the templatic nature of morphology, since the first and second
diminutives are formed differently.