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Vol. 57, no. 2 (Summer 2015)

Contents

Abstracts

Predicative Possession and Existentials on the Oregon Coast: Alsea, Hanis, and Miluk

Paul D. Kroeber
Indiana University

Abstract. Possessive (‘have’) clauses with indefinite possessees are surveyed in three now-extinct languages of the Oregon coast—Alsea, Hanis Coos, and Miluk Coos. Adjectival or verbal denominals marked by prefix-suffix combinations are employed when the possessee is unmodified; when it is modified, a different construction is used in which the modifier is treated as the clause predicate. Similar constructions also express existence and location of unpossessed entities. Negative possession and negative existentials involve negators distinct from ordinary negation, but the syntax of these differs in Alsea versus Hanis and Miluk. Few or no other languages in the southerly Northwest Coast show quite the same configuration of constructions as either Alsea or Hanis and Miluk.

Words That Smell like Father-in-Law: A Linguistic Description of the Datooga Avoidance Register

Alice Mitchell
University of Hamburg

Abstract. This article describes an avoidance register of Datooga, a Nilotic language of Tanzania. Datooga women show respect to their senior in-laws by avoiding not only these in-laws’ names but also lexically related and similar-sounding words. Near-homophone avoidance is partly determined by phonological criteria but also by idiosyncratic metalinguistic judgments and social convention. To avoid taboo words, women have developed a conventionalized avoidance vocabulary, assembled by means of various linguistic strategies, including consonant replacement, borrowing, and derivation. Avoidance words make use of a wide range of linguistic resources and illustrate well the heterogeneous results of taboo-motivated language change.

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