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Vol. 39, no. 3 (Fall 1997)

Contents

Abstracts

Political Philology: Everyday Consequences of Grandiose Grammars

Michael Herzfeld
Harvard University

Abstract. The politicization of language in Greece produced a form of "political philology" that makes etymology an important but contested item of symbolic capital and a yardstick of cultural and moral purity. The effects of this process are also evident in the morphological preferences exhibited in everyday and public usage, especially in politically sensitive contexts. The official demise of the once-powerful purist register (katharevousa) has led to an increasingly complex pattern of ambiguity, allowing skilled social actors to deploy puristic forms against those who once claimed to represent the national ideal.

Relativization in Thompson River Salish

Paul D. Kroeber
Indiana University

Abstract. The morphology and surface syntax of relative clauses and related focusing constructions in Thompson River Salish are described, and the broader paradigmatic context of types of subordination and focusing with which these constructions contrast is sketched. Of particular interest are the determination of relative clause predicate morphology by what is relativized and the treatment of relativization of locatives - the latter having distinctive properties in comparison to other Salish languages.

A Reexamination of Proto-Athabaskan *y

Keren Rice
University of Toronto

Abstract. In this paper, I argue that the reconstruction of both nonnasal sonorants and voiced fricatives for Proto-Athapaskan (Krauss and Leer 1981) is unnecessary, but that these were one and the same, namely, voiced sonorants. The evidence presented by Krauss and Leer favoring both sonorants and voiced fricatives is reevaluated, and it is shown that with current assumptions of phonological theory, the conclusion that both are necessary cannot be upheld. A simplification in the Proto-Athapaskan consonant inventory is achieved by this reanalysis.

On Reduplication in Ojibwa

Joseph L. Malone
Barnard College and Columbia University

Abstract. The incidence of prefixal reduplication is analyzed in 400-odd pages of traditional Ojibwa stories (Jones 1919), making for a total corpus of 275 items. The most prominent general function of this important derivational device is to convey expansiveness, a force that makes itself felt in time or space either "horizontally," in the case of repetitives, continuatives, and distributives or "vertically," in the case of energics. Less prominently represented than expansive forms are handicaptives and inceptives at least the latter of which may have arisen as a generalization of repetitive or continuative action (the more protracted an event, the more salient its beginning). The paper concludes with a brief discussion of reduplicated forms that may be losing their expansive force through lexicalization.

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