Website by Anthony C Woodbury
Lengua Chatino: Recursos - website at https://sites.google.com/site/lenguachatino/
Archivo digital de materiales y otros recursos académicos y pedagógicos sobre las lenguas chatino... more Archivo digital de materiales y otros recursos académicos y pedagógicos sobre las lenguas chatinos creido por miembros del projecto de la documentación de las lenguas chatino, 2003-presente.
Digital archive of academic and pedagogical materials and other resources on the Chatino languages created by members of the Chatino Language Documentation Project, 2003-present.
Papers by Anthony C Woodbury
We describe our own experience of linguist-community collaboration over the last ten years in our... more We describe our own experience of linguist-community collaboration over the last ten years in our Chatino Language Documentation Project, focused on the Chatino languages (Otomanguean; Oaxaca, Mexico). We relate episodes in the emergence and evolution of the collaboration between ourselves, and of the collaboration among ourselves and the Chatino communities with which we have worked. Our experience has several special features. First, our own collaboration began as native Chatino-speaking Ph.D. student and her teacher in a program focused on training speakers of Latin American indigenous languages in linguistics and anthropology, and developed into a larger collaboration among students and faculty where the student had a major leadership role. Second, our approach was documentary-descriptive and comparative, but it was also socially engaged or 'activist,', in that we sought to promote interest, awareness, and respect for the Chatino languages, to teach and support Chatino literacy, and to preserve and offer access to spoken Chatino, especially traditional verbal art. Our approach had synergies with local interests in writing and in honoring traditional speech ways, but it also led to conflicts over our roles as social actors, and the traditionally activist roles of indigenous teachers. Third, we experienced plasticity in the collaborative roles we played. Between ourselves, we were student and teacher, but also initiator and follower as we became engaged in revitalization. At the same time, the native speaker linguist found herself occupying a range of positions along a continuum from " insider " to " outsider " respect to her own community.
This is a sketch of polysynthesis in Central Alaskan Yupik (CAY) based on the Cup'ik dialect of C... more This is a sketch of polysynthesis in Central Alaskan Yupik (CAY) based on the Cup'ik dialect of Chevak, Alaska. CAY has well-defined words whose content is often holophrastic and whose parts are often word-like. Holophrasis is achieved by a combination of rich inflectional suffixation and by a derivational morphology in which several hundred productive suffixes bearing different lexical and grammatical meanings and functions may be added, recursively, to a lexical base. Each suffix selects the category of its base, over which it normally has scope, and determines the category of the resultant base. This simple but prolific suffixation-based system, termed 'morphological orthodoxy', yields long, polysynthetic words. Three cases are then discussed where suffixal elements govern constructions that in one way or another stretch CAY's orthodox morphology, motivating them by showing parallel constructions governed by elements with similar grammatical and semantic content in languages with more heterodox morphology and syntax.
In the Chatino languages (Otomanguean; Oaxaca, Mexico), verbs show two independent patterns of co... more In the Chatino languages (Otomanguean; Oaxaca, Mexico), verbs show two independent patterns of conjugational classification in marking aspect and mood, one based on prefixation and the other based on tonal ablaut. I term this CONJUGATIONAL DOUBLE-CLASSIFICATION. Each pattern determines its own conjugational classification of verb stems: verbs fall into several aspect/mood prefix conjugation classes that depend partly on their segmental structure and transitivity; and they simultaneously fall into several largely orthogonal tone ablaut conjugation classes that depend partly on the tonal characteristics of the stem. A Chatino child therefore must learn both the prefix conjugation class and the tone-ablaut conjugation class of every verb s/he learns. Furthermore, it is shown that diachronically, the prefix classes and the tone-ablaut classes have had independent LIFE CYCLES: in San Marcos Zacatepec Eastern Chatino (ctz), both systems are largely intact; in Zenzontepec Chatino (czn), the prefixation classes are intact but the tone ablaut classes have eroded through tonal simplification; and in San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino (ctp), the prefixation classes have eroded through initial syllable loss while the tone ablaut classes are intact. It is suggested that autosegmental phonology and morphology, when placed in diachronic perspective, easily allow such conjugational double classification when tone and segmental prefixation occupy distinct autosegmental tiers and when prefixes are largely non-tone bearing.
Language documentation and description 12, 2014
Language documentation and conservation, 2014
We describe our own experience of linguist-community collaboration over the last ten years in our... more We describe our own experience of linguist-community collaboration over the last ten years in our Chatino Language Documentation Project, focused on the Chatino languages (Otomanguean; Oaxaca, Mexico). We relate episodes in the emergence and evolution of the collaboration between ourselves, and of the collaboration among ourselves and the Chatino communities with which we have worked. Our experience has several special features. First, our own collaboration began as native Chatino-speaking Ph.D. student and her teacher in a program focused on training speakers of Latin American indigenous languages in linguistics and anthropology, and developed into a larger collaboration among students and faculty where the student had a major leadership role. Second, our approach was documentary-descriptive and comparative, but it was also socially engaged or ‘activist,’, in that we sought to promote interest, awareness, and respect for the Chatino languages, to teach and support Chatino literacy, and to preserve and offer access to spoken Chatino, especially traditional verbal art. Our approach had synergies with local interests in writing and in honoring traditional speech ways, but it also led to conflicts over our roles as social actors, and the traditionally activist roles of indigenous teachers. Third, we experienced plasticity in the collaborative roles we played. Between ourselves, we were student and teacher, but also initiator and follower as we became engaged in revitalization. At the same time, the native speaker linguist found herself occupying a range of positions along a continuum from “insider” to “outsider” respect to her own community.
We give a narrative description of our ten-year path into the elaborate tonal systems of the Chat... more We give a narrative description of our ten-year path into the elaborate tonal systems of the Chatino languages (Otomanguean; Oaxaca, Mexico), and of some of the methods we have used and recommend, illustrated with speci c examples. The work, ongoing at the time of writing, began when one of us (Cruz), a native speaker of San Juan Quiahije Chatino, entered the University of Texas at Austin as a Ph.D. student and formed, together with the other of us (Woodbury), a professor there, the Chatino Language Documentation Project, ultimately incorporating ve other Ph.D. students and two other senior researchers. We argue for the importance of an interplay among speaker and non-speaker perspectives over the long course of work; a mix of introspection, hypothesis-testing, natural speech record- ing, transcription, translation, grammatical analysis, and dictionary-making as research methods and activities; an emphasis on community training as an active research context; the simultaneous study of many varieties within a close-knit language family to leverage progress; and the use of historical-comparative methods to get to know tonal systems and the roles they play at a deeper level.
A preliminary exposition of the tonal system of the Chatino language of Tataltepec de Valdés, Oax... more A preliminary exposition of the tonal system of the Chatino language of Tataltepec de Valdés, Oaxaca, Mexico.
Atkan Aleut has non-subject pronominals that are attracted to a position just before the verb but... more Atkan Aleut has non-subject pronominals that are attracted to a position just before the verb but do not fuse with it. This behavior, termed UNCLITIC, is modeled using a version of the automodular analysis proposed by Sadock (1991). The unclitic pattern is proposed as the explanation for a set of apparent counterexamples in the puzzling word-order-and-‘definiteness’ paradigms first presented by Bergsland and Dirks (1981:31-33) and commented on by Fortescue (1987), Leer (1988), and Sadock (2009). (Atkan Aleut, clitics, word order, definiteness, Autolexical syntax, multimodular analysis)
A preliminary exposition of the tonal system of San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino, indicating 13 ... more A preliminary exposition of the tonal system of San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino, indicating 13 distinct lexical classes, each defined by a different tonal pattern. The paper further demonstrates tonal sandhi changes in two-word windows for all logically possible combinations of tonal patterns (13 x 13 = 169), and accounts for them through a combination of representations for the tonal patterns, and rules for their interaction. In the representations, three distinct unlinked or "floating" tones that link forward from a host word to a following word depending on the following word's tonal pattern.
Preliminary sketch of phonology and tone in San Marcos Zacatepec Eastern Chatino, and presentatio... more Preliminary sketch of phonology and tone in San Marcos Zacatepec Eastern Chatino, and presentation of a scheme for handling cognate tone classes across Eastern Chatino varieties.
Linguistic Discovery, 2006
The core idea of CILLA is to recruit into our Linguistics and Anthropology Ph.D. programs promisi... more The core idea of CILLA is to recruit into our Linguistics and Anthropology Ph.D. programs promising graduate students from indigenous communities in Latin America. The students focus on documentary and descriptive linguistics, which we take as the starting point for both scientific study and community language activism.
It is sometimes argued that the language of certain indigenous communities in North America and A... more It is sometimes argued that the language of certain indigenous communities in North America and Australia is no longer the ancestral language, but ‘Indian English’ or ‘Eskimo English’ or ‘Aboriginal English.’ But are these stable, persistent, emblems of community identity, hence ‘languages’ just like English, Navajo, Yupik, or Warlpiri, or are they just transient phenomena, noticeable perhaps to standard-English speakers but lacking in linguistic and sociolinguistic ‘focus’ (LePage and Tabouret-Keller, 1985)? It is a question that really matters when communities and linguists must decide whether to document, teach, and promote these languages alongside, or even in preference to, the ancestral language.
In this paper, I want to discuss the question of just what to document in your own, or somebody else’s community, proposing a series of alternative documentation models and their implications for local and wider communities. In this paper, I want to discuss the question of just what to document in your own, or somebody else’s community, proposing a series of alternative documentation models and their implications for local and wider communities.
Yupik-Inuit (or Eskimo) languages have one pervasive morphological process, recursive suffixation... more Yupik-Inuit (or Eskimo) languages have one pervasive morphological process, recursive suffixation to a base, and—normally—a corollary scope rule according to which any suffix is an operator or modifier with scope over exactly the base to which it was added. This pattern is both prolific and exclusive: there is (almost) no prefixation, no mutation, ablaut, reduplication, nor any base-base or (practi- cally any) word-word compounding. Moreover the pattern has apparently been historically persistent, since it dominates all known members of Yupik-Inuit and more distantly-related Aleut as well.
Taking this morphological ‘straitjacket’ as its starting point, this paper explores violations of the corollary scope rule. My point is that these scopal violations are determined by the grammatical or semantic content of individual suffixes, in keeping with the behavior associated with that content in languages with more heterodox morphology and syntax. In effect, then, the language family’s orthodox morphology becomes the ground for a natural experiment, allowing us to diagnose independent and perhaps universal structural proclivities of certain common lexico-grammatical functions.
We describe our experiences training speakers of indigenous languages of Latin America in documen... more We describe our experiences training speakers of indigenous languages of Latin America in documentary linguistics at a major US university. We feel that it has had and will have benefits for community language preservation efforts, for documentary linguistics, for linguistics more generally, and for our university. We hope here to make this case; and we hope it will encourage those in other universities contemplating such a programme for themselves in a way that suits their own interests, needs, and world position.
In the last fifteen years, we have seen the emergence of a branch of linguistics which has come t... more In the last fifteen years, we have seen the emergence of a branch of linguistics which has come to be called Documentary Linguistics. It is concerned with the making and keeping of records of the world’s languages and their patterns of use. This emergence has taken place alongside major changes in the technology of linguistic data representation and maintenance; alongside new attention to linguistic diversity; alongside an increasing focus on the threats to that diversity by the endangerment of languages and language practices around the world, especially in small indigenous communities; and perhaps most importantly of all, alongside the discipline’s growing awareness that linguistic documentation has crucial stakeholders well beyond the academic community; in endangered language communities themselves, but also beyond. The purpose of this paper is to discuss documentary linguistics, how it has been emerging, and where it may be headed.
The use and interpretation of conversational overlap is described in four hours of speech taped i... more The use and interpretation of conversational overlap is described in four hours of speech taped in 1978 in a traditional Yupʼik qaygiq, or menʼs house, in Chevak, Alaska. Speaker turns are usually separated by pauses but there is occasional, limited overlap. It is most likely when the overlapping turn is informationally congruent with the prior turn, when speaker roles are routinized, when participants are partners in authority, and (perhaps) when the overlapping speaker has greater authority. The phenomena are modelled as an interaction between universal and culturally specific principles of conversational use and interpretation. It is claimed that such interaction can be recognized only when single speech situations are studied systematically in both their linguistic and ethnographic contexts.
The proposition 'When a language dies, a culture dies' gives a reason for preserving endangered l... more The proposition 'When a language dies, a culture dies' gives a reason for preserving endangered languages, but raises valid questions in light of recent work on multilingual communities and on the conservatism of some aspects of language use in situations of language shift. It is claimed that these objections are met if the proposition is revised to say that interrupted transmission of an integrated lexical and grammatical heritage spells the direct end of some cultural traditions, and the unraveling, restructuring, and reevaluation of others. In support of this, it is argued that in situations of language shift, ancestral and replacing languages are not equivalent vehicles for cultural maintenance or expression. An extended empirical case is made on the basis of Central Alaskan Yupik Eskimo demonstrative use.
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Website by Anthony C Woodbury
Digital archive of academic and pedagogical materials and other resources on the Chatino languages created by members of the Chatino Language Documentation Project, 2003-present.
Papers by Anthony C Woodbury
In this paper, I want to discuss the question of just what to document in your own, or somebody else’s community, proposing a series of alternative documentation models and their implications for local and wider communities. In this paper, I want to discuss the question of just what to document in your own, or somebody else’s community, proposing a series of alternative documentation models and their implications for local and wider communities.
Taking this morphological ‘straitjacket’ as its starting point, this paper explores violations of the corollary scope rule. My point is that these scopal violations are determined by the grammatical or semantic content of individual suffixes, in keeping with the behavior associated with that content in languages with more heterodox morphology and syntax. In effect, then, the language family’s orthodox morphology becomes the ground for a natural experiment, allowing us to diagnose independent and perhaps universal structural proclivities of certain common lexico-grammatical functions.