Clause structure, agreement and case in Gitksan

This dissertation proposes an analysis of certain aspects of the syntax and morphology of Gitksan, a Tsimshianic language of northwestern British Columbia. In particular, the goal of the dissertation is to show that, despite claims and surface appearances to the contrary, the structure of a Gitksan...

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Main Author: Hunt, Katharine D.
Format: Thesis
Language:English
Published: 1993
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/2429/1898
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spelling ftunivbritcolcir:oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/1898 2023-05-15T18:39:29+02:00 Clause structure, agreement and case in Gitksan Hunt, Katharine D. 1993 10111488 bytes application/pdf http://hdl.handle.net/2429/1898 eng eng For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. Gitksan Indians - Languages Text Thesis/Dissertation 1993 ftunivbritcolcir 2019-10-15T17:43:32Z This dissertation proposes an analysis of certain aspects of the syntax and morphology of Gitksan, a Tsimshianic language of northwestern British Columbia. In particular, the goal of the dissertation is to show that, despite claims and surface appearances to the contrary, the structure of a Gitksan sentence conforms to the putatively universal constraints on sentence structure proposed in Government and Binding theory. In order to defend this claim, I show that other structures which have been proposed for the language are not well-motivated by data, and that the structure I propose is able to account for the complex case and agreement facts observed in declarative Gitksan sentences. The thesis is structured in the following way. Chapter 1 briefly sketches the theoretical framework I assume, while Chapter 2 consists of a short introduction to some salient aspects of Gitksan phonology, morphology and syntax. Chapter 3 contains a comprehensive discussion of typological and structural properties of Gitksan sentences. I review those characteristics of the language which have led researchers to claim that Gitksan is either an ergative or a non-configurational language, but I argue that these surface characteristics do not provide compelling evidence that Gitksan should be assigned any divergent type of syntactic structure. On the contrary, I show that there is syntactic evidence in Gitksan to support a standard structure. I conclude Chapter 3 by examining a possible alternative proposal, namely that Gitksan is a pronominal argument language.’ Once again, however, I argue that the data are more consistent with a conservative account- in this case, one in which nominals function as arguments rather than adjuncts. In Chapter 4, I present in some detail data relating to agreement, case and the distribution of overt and silent pronominals in Gitksan, showing how these complex data can be accounted for under the structure I assume. The analysis presented in this chapter has important consequences for the treatment of morphological agreement and case in GB theory. Arts, Faculty of Linguistics, Department of Graduate Thesis Tsimshian* University of British Columbia: cIRcle - UBC's Information Repository
institution Open Polar
collection University of British Columbia: cIRcle - UBC's Information Repository
op_collection_id ftunivbritcolcir
language English
topic Gitksan Indians - Languages
spellingShingle Gitksan Indians - Languages
Hunt, Katharine D.
Clause structure, agreement and case in Gitksan
topic_facet Gitksan Indians - Languages
description This dissertation proposes an analysis of certain aspects of the syntax and morphology of Gitksan, a Tsimshianic language of northwestern British Columbia. In particular, the goal of the dissertation is to show that, despite claims and surface appearances to the contrary, the structure of a Gitksan sentence conforms to the putatively universal constraints on sentence structure proposed in Government and Binding theory. In order to defend this claim, I show that other structures which have been proposed for the language are not well-motivated by data, and that the structure I propose is able to account for the complex case and agreement facts observed in declarative Gitksan sentences. The thesis is structured in the following way. Chapter 1 briefly sketches the theoretical framework I assume, while Chapter 2 consists of a short introduction to some salient aspects of Gitksan phonology, morphology and syntax. Chapter 3 contains a comprehensive discussion of typological and structural properties of Gitksan sentences. I review those characteristics of the language which have led researchers to claim that Gitksan is either an ergative or a non-configurational language, but I argue that these surface characteristics do not provide compelling evidence that Gitksan should be assigned any divergent type of syntactic structure. On the contrary, I show that there is syntactic evidence in Gitksan to support a standard structure. I conclude Chapter 3 by examining a possible alternative proposal, namely that Gitksan is a pronominal argument language.’ Once again, however, I argue that the data are more consistent with a conservative account- in this case, one in which nominals function as arguments rather than adjuncts. In Chapter 4, I present in some detail data relating to agreement, case and the distribution of overt and silent pronominals in Gitksan, showing how these complex data can be accounted for under the structure I assume. The analysis presented in this chapter has important consequences for the treatment of morphological agreement and case in GB theory. Arts, Faculty of Linguistics, Department of Graduate
format Thesis
author Hunt, Katharine D.
author_facet Hunt, Katharine D.
author_sort Hunt, Katharine D.
title Clause structure, agreement and case in Gitksan
title_short Clause structure, agreement and case in Gitksan
title_full Clause structure, agreement and case in Gitksan
title_fullStr Clause structure, agreement and case in Gitksan
title_full_unstemmed Clause structure, agreement and case in Gitksan
title_sort clause structure, agreement and case in gitksan
publishDate 1993
url http://hdl.handle.net/2429/1898
genre Tsimshian*
genre_facet Tsimshian*
op_rights For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.
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