[X] Anthropological Linguistics

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Vol. 52, no. 1 (Spring 2010)

Contents

Articles

Linguistic Variation in a Small Speech Community: The Personal Dialects of Moraviantown Delaware Ives Goddard 1

The Art of Voice: Understanding the Arizona Tewa Inverse in Its Grammatical, Narrative, and Language-Ideological Contexts Paul V. Kroskrity 49

Battered Spanish, Eloquent Mixe: Form and Function of Mixe Difrasismos Daniel F. Suslak 80

Book Reviews
The Language of the Inuit: Syntax, Semantics, and Society in the Arctic (Louis-Jacques Dorais) Elke Nowak 104
Uchumataqu: The Lost Language of the Urus of Bolivia: A Description of the Language as Documented between 1894 and 1952 (Katja Hannß) Swintha Danielsen 107
A Hausa-English Dictionary (Paul Newman) Mahamane L. Abdoulaye 111
Corpus Linguistics and World Englishes: An Analysis of Xhosa English (Vivian de Klerk) Sandra Kübler 114

Abstracts

Linguistic Variation in a Small Speech Community: The Personal Dialects of Moraviantown Delaware

Ives Goddard
Smithsonian Institution

Abstract. The Munsee language as spoken on the Moraviantown Reserve in the late 1960s had extensive phonological, lexical, and morphological variation among the small number of surviving speakers. Some of this variation can be attributed to the diverse origins of the population, and some apparently results from recent change, but lexical variation in particular was accepted by speakers as an integral feature of Moraviantown speech. Each speaker had a personal dialect, whose distinguishing features were often explicitly recognized by others.

The Art of Voice: Understanding the Arizona Tewa Inverse in Its Grammatical, Narrative, and Language-Ideological Contexts

Paul V. Kroskrity
University of California, Los Angeles

Abstract. This study examines aspects of a morphological inverse construction in Arizona Tewa, a Kiowa-Tanoan language. This inverse is optional for configurations involving third person agents and patients and obligatory when the patient is a speech act participant. It is partially passivelike in that it makes patients subject-topics and demotes agents, as is shown as well in quantitative and qualitative analyses of traditional narratives. This construction forms part of speakers’ practical, but not discursive, consciousness.

Battered Spanish, Eloquent Mixe: Form and Function of Mixe Difrasismos

Daniel F. Suslak
Indiana University

Abstract. One of the marks of a skillful speaker of Totontepecano Mixe is the ability to employ parallel couplets such as tùʾk ʾaaj tùʾk joot ‘one mouth, one belly’ in a variety of discursive genres, ranging from prayer and political oratory to joking and storytelling. Comparable poetic forms, which Mesoamericanists refer to as difrasismos, are found in indigenous oral traditions across Mexico and Central America. This article examines the formal properties of Totontepecano difrasismos and explores the uses to which Totontepecanos put them, both formal and informal.

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