A Carib Grammar and Dictionary (review)

A Carib Grammar and Dictionary (review) Doris L. Payne

Anthropological Linguistics, Volume 51, Number 1, Spring 2009, pp. 82-86 (Article) Published by University of Nebraska Press DOI: 10.1353/anl.0.0004

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/anl/summary/v051/51.1.payne.html

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Mattina, Anthony 1987 Colville-Okanagan Dictionary. University of Montana Occasional Papers in Linguistics 5. Missoula: Department of Anthropology, University of Montana. Nicodemus, Lawrence 1973 The Coeur d’Alene Language Project: Summary of Objectives and Contents. Presented at the Eighth International Conference on Salish Languages, Eugene, Oregon, August 13—15. 1975a Snchitsu’umshtsn: The Coeur d’Alene Language. 2 vols. [Plummer, Idaho]: Coeur d’Alene Tribal Council. 1975b Snchitsu’umshtsn: The Coeur d’Alene Language: A Modern Course. Plummer, Idaho: Coeur d’Alene Tribe. Reichard, Gladys 1938 Coeur d’Alene. In Handbook of American Indian Languages. Part 3, edited by Franz Boas, 17—70. New York: J. J. Augustin. 1939 Stem-List of the Coeur d’Alene Language. International Journal of American Linguistics 10:92—108. 1947 An Analysis of Coeur d’Alene Indian Myths. With a comparison by Adele Froelich. Memoirs of the American Folklore Society 41. Philadelphia: American Folklore Society. n.d. Coeur d’Alene Myths and Tales. MS. Teit, James 1927 The Salish Tribes of the Western Plateaus. Bureau of American Ethnology Forty-Fifth Annual Report, 23—396. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

A Carib Grammar and Dictionary. HENDRIK COURTZ. Toronto: Magoria Books, 2008. Pp. xi + 501. $39.95 (paper). Reviewed by Doris L. Payne, University of Oregon The Carib language, from which the name of the Cariban language family derives, is scattered across discontinuous parts of eastern Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam, and French Guiana. The number of speakers is now probably somewhere between six thousand and ten thousand (p. 2). The four main dialects include Venezuelan Carib, Guyanese Carib, Western Surinamese Carib, and Eastern Surinamese and French Guianese Carib. The volume under review originated as the author’s Ph.D. dissertation at Leiden University. It comprises the classic descriptive trilogy–a grammatical sketch, this one focused principally at the word level including morphology and morphophonemics; three interlinearized texts, corresponding to three distinct genres; and a cross-dialect dictionary comprising some 6,500 lexemes, about 3,000 of which are new relative to previous works on the Carib language. With its greatly expanded number of lexical items, this grammar and dictionary is an essential acquisition for anyone seriously interested in the Carib language, and it is also an important resource for anyone pursuing historical work on the Cariban family. An excellent introduction briefly addresses sociolinguistic and demographic issues and how the author’s analyses compare with previous linguistic treatments of the various Carib dialects. It also lays out the author’s position on certain controversies in the analysis of Carib and Cariban languages. User-friendly features of the work are a list of grammatical abbreviations (pp. ix—xi) and an appendix of all Carib

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affixes (pp. 441—48). A second appendix lists nature words for both flora and fauna with scientific names. The grammar (pp. 21—146) constitutes about 30 percent of the entire work, though it is not a full grammar as that term is commonly understood in descriptive linguistics today. The section on “Sounds” (pp. 21—49) focuses primarily on the inventory of phonemes and syllables, and proposes a unified phonemically-based orthography for writing all dialects; there is a nonpolemical exposition of how the unified orthography compares to each previous proposal. The heart of the grammar (pp. 51—113) deals with parts of speech, including their inflectional and derivational potential. Barely ten pages (pp. 137—46) are devoted to “sentences” or syntax per se, and there is no real treatment of grammatical relations (an issue of high interest for the Cariban family), question constructions, focus constructions, subordinate clauses, etc. A reader who already knows something about syntax across the Cariban family may deduce some likely syntactic patterns from certain full-sentence examples found throughout the discussion of morphology and from the texts, but this is hardly equivalent to explicit treatment of basic syntactic issues. Only quite sparse discussion is provided of some functional domains that are of typological note in at least some other Cariban languages, such as nominalizing and participial forms and tense-aspect-evidentiality. Courtz’s treatment of parts of speech merits some discussion, as this is the heart of his grammar and Carib parts of speech do raise issues of typological significance. Courtz identifies eight parts of speech, and gives a basic but apparently comprehensive listing of the morphology and morphophonemics associated with each word class. This focus is well motivated within the context of the dictionary portion of the work, as understanding the morphology is essential for being able to look up words (see further below). Courtz’s definitions of parts of speech appear to be first and foremost semantically based (though followed up with brief accounts of major morphosyntactic characteristics): nouns are defined as words that designate “an entity” (p. 55); adjectives as those that designate “a quality,” which qualify an entity (p. 71), or which “indicate a property” (p. 142); verbs as those that designate “a process, i.e. some kind of participation in real or imaginary time” (curiously, there is no discussion about whether stative verbs might exist) (p. 73); postpositions designate “a relation” (p. 97). A semantics-first approach to parts of speech is, I believe, quite problematic in any language family, and if applied seriously would obscure typologically significant facts about Cariban languages. For instance, Carib has affixes that can refer to “past possession” (p. 58). Courtz’s semantic approach to defining verbs as involving “some kind of participation in real or imaginary time” would, at face value, appear to include the stems or words that can take these past-time affixes–and would, hence, include terms for body parts, kinsfolk, and gardens within the class of “verbs.” Interestingly, in at least this instance (and without discussion), Courtz does not actually rely on his semantic definition for classifying the stems in question, and considers words that take these past possession affixes as “nouns.” Work on other Cariban languages (e.g., Derbyshire [1979] on Hixkaryana, and work by Thomas Payne and the current reviewer on Panare) has identified what have been called “AD-forms”. This is a name for a distinct word class that can modify both verbs and nouns. Courtz’s Carib “adjectives” are said to have both “adverb” and “adnominal” forms, and appear to reflect a similar (if not identical) part of speech to the AD-forms of other Cariban languages. Courtz’s reasons for choosing the label “adjective” for this word or stem category are not very clearly laid out (beyond the semantic criterion), and I expect his discussion about “adjective,” “adverb,” and “adnominal” categories will be fairly hard for a reader to follow who does not already grasp the general outlines of Cariban word classes. (The grammatical facts surrounding parts of speech might be clearer if there were a fuller treatment of syntax.) The author’s discussion of postposi-

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tions draws parallels to the class of “adjectives” in that both “show contrast between an adverbial form, of which the meaning is (also) connected to a verbal process, and an adnominal form, of which the meaning is (solely) connected to a nominal entity” (p. 98). There is never any definition of “adnominal” as used in the grammar, but the term is perhaps intended to designate a type of word that can modify a noun (though apparently “adjectives” in their “adverbial” form also can do this, though perhaps “indirectly, i.e. via a verb” [p. 71]). However, there is also a morphosyntactic dimension to the characterization of adnominals, as they carry an apparently derivational suffix (generally ¤no), and once so affixed can further take the plural suffix ¤kon “which also occurs on nouns” (p. 71). They can furthermore refer to an entity without an accompanying noun (p. 72). Now, despite these seemingly clear nominal properties, Courtz rejects calling them “nouns”; his argument is based on perceived analogies to Dutch “adnominal adjectives” (p. 71, n. 135), and the fact that adnominal “quality” words precede “entity” words (pp. 71—72). But one might just as well have called on facts about English to argue that the order restrictions in Carib are strictly semantic. In English, words such as fat, tall, big, or red are all traditionally identified as adjectives based partly on their morphological potential (e.g., fat, fatter, fattest; tall, taller, tallest; big, bigger, biggest; red, redder, reddest), even though English has order constraints on the cooccurence of these items, as shown by strong dispreference for *red big ball and *fat tall giraffe. The traditional approach to the English restrictions is to propose semantically-based principles (e.g., “In English, size modifiers precede color modifiers”), but not to propose that tall belongs to a separate part of speech from fat. To do so would ignore the morphological formations that identify tall, fat, big, and red as members of a single part of speech. Analogously, for Carib one could likewise propose a semantically-based principle for the order facts (e.g., “In Carib, quality nouns occur before entity nouns”), and hence not interpret these as evidence that the “adnominals” are a different part of speech from “nominals.” In proposing that “adnominals” are different from “nouns” because of the relative order, Courtz effectively ignores their potential to take identical plural morphology and their ability to stand alone to name a referent. In sum, both the “adjective” label and the proposal that adnominals are a distinct part of speech from nouns are cross-linguistically and theoretically misleading positions because they fail to acknowledge significant facts about Carib. About 11 percent of the work (pp. 147—203) consists of three interlinearized texts: an oral third person traditional story, an oral first person narrative, and a written personal letter. These are beautifully presented. First, information on the speaker or writer and circumstances surrounding the original linguistic event is given. This is followed by an idiomatic English rendition of the text; then comes the interlinearized text, which includes four lines of information: a surface word form in the unified orthography, a morphological analysis giving morphemes in something like their underlying form (still in the unified orthography), a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, and a close (but intelligible) clause-by-clause English translation. The dictionary proper constitutes about 46 percent of the book (pp. 205—440). Entries include “headwords” (see further below), codes for dialects that use the entry form, alternative dialect forms, indications of (historical) morphological composition for complex forms, part-of-speech labels, a brief English definition or equivalencies, some example sentences (though by no means for all entries), subentries, and in some cases a reference to Ahlbrinck’s (1931) encyclopedia of Carib. Carib is a prefixing as well as suffixing language, with a good number of morphophonemic processes. I am very sympathetic to the challenges that such a language presents for dictionary construction. Working through the interlinearized texts can help the reader appreciate the morphophonemic difficulties in developing a dictionary for a language like Carib. To take just one example, a fairly frequent word in the first

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interlinearized text is kynkanon ‘he said’. One would be hard pressed to go from this complete word to find the stem involved in the dictionary, which turns out to be (w)yka. The morphological analysis in the interlinearized texts is ky¤ ni¤ (w)yka ¤non (roughly, ‘he reputedly says’). It is each of the underlying pieces in the interlinear analysis that one finds as headwords in the dictionary: entry forms include all affixes and the shortest forms of “lexical units” (p. 206), which for nouns and verbs is a stem. Courtz acknowledges that the listed headword form of nouns and verbs “may not occur per se in Carib speech or text” (p. 206). This raises the question of “Who is the intended audience of the dictionary?”–an essential consideration in evaluating any dictionary. Courtz does not answer this question directly in his introductory comments, but the choice of entry form, the fact that the grammar is written in English, and that the dictionary is bilingual from Carib to English, together suggest that the intended audience is the scholarly community or educated nonnative speakers who may wish to understand the Carib language better, and not primarily native speakers (who may be multilingual in some mix of Carib, English, Creole English, Spanish, Dutch, French, Creole French, or Portuguese, depending on their geographical location). But even for the probable intended audience, a serious gap in the work is the lack of an English to Carib glossary or finder list, as it can sometimes be quite difficult to use the dictionary to parse examples contained even in the dictionary entries themselves with just a Carib-English stem and affix dictionary. For one of the easier examples, consider ajauty pàpompo po yjauty samutake ‘I’ll build my house where your house stood before’, in the entry for pa ‘place, hammock’ (p. 333). The entry itself includes pàpo as a derived form (though not as a subentry), meaning ‘empty place, place where someone or something used to be’. The dictionary also has a main entry for the word po ‘in, at’. From having read the grammar, I recall that ¤mpo is a suffix on nouns meaning ‘devalued’, and that a¤ and y¤ are second and first person prefixes for both verbs and possessed nouns. By logical morphological analysis, one might suspect a root jauty with some meaning like ‘house’ (semantic parallelism in the example also suggests this), but no such entry exists in the dictionary. Instead, after considerable searching (because I failed to remember a crucial allomorphic statement on p. 57, according to which noun stems with an initial a, e, o, or u add a j following the prefixes y¤ ‘I’ and a¤ ‘you’), I did find an entry auto, with a possessed stem form auty ‘house’. There now remains just the word samutake. The appendix of Carib affixes (pp. 441—48) includes ¤take ‘tense, future, plural’ and a prefix si¤ ‘first person singular transitive subject’. This leaves the form amu, for which there is no dictionary entry (there is a dictionary entry amu, but this is listed as a “number” meaning ‘a’, which makes no sense in the context of the example). There is also no stem like *emu or *ymu, *mu, etc., but I surmise that amu must have some meaning related to a verb ‘build’ because that is the remaining piece of the example’s meaning still unaccounted for. Here is where an English finder list is essential for a prefixing language with significant morphophonemics; one could have used it to determine what stem form to look up in the dictionary for a concept like ‘build’, ‘make’, or ‘construct’ (or even to evaluate whether the dictionary comprehensively covers the lexemes in its own example sentences). In sum, the grammar at the beginning of the volume, with its focus on word-level morphology and parts of speech, appears to have been developed with precisely the challenges of using the Carib dictionary in mind. Clearly, in order to look up or parse words successfully, one must effectively memorize the grammar and make heavy use of the affix list at the end of the dictionary; thus, a reverse bilingual vocabulary or finder list would seem to be essential for this sort of language. Even so, this book is a very valuable contribution to Carib studies, particularly for linguists or anthropologists who seek greater lexical and morphological knowledge of the language.

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References Ahlbrinck, Willem 1931 Encyclopaedie de Karaïben, behelzend taal, zeden en gewoonten dezer Indianen. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen. Derbyshire, Desmond C. 1979 Hixkaryana. Amsterdam: North-Holland.

Standard Basque: A Progressive Grammar. RUDOLF P. G. DE RIJK. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008. Pp. xxvi + 1370. $100.00 (hardcover). Reviewed by Jon Ortiz de Urbina, University of Deusto Rudolf de Rijk’s untimely death in June 2003 put a sudden end to the work of one of the most brilliant figures in the area of Basque linguistics. He left behind groundbreaking contributions to Basque phonology, morphology, syntax, philology, lexicography, and history (see de Rijk 1998 for a selection), and the unanimous admiration and respect of Bascologists of different ages and theoretical persuasions. He also left behind an unfinished grammar of Basque that he had been working on since the 1980s and had nearly completed when death overcame him. Basing the grammar on materials in Dutch that he had prepared for his classes in the Department of Comparative Linguistics, University of Leiden, he managed to expand and complete twenty-seven chapters, which have become the backbone of this posthumous edition, accounting for 778 pages of the book. The remaining, unfinished six chapters, dealing with some aspects of morphology, tenseless complementation, coordination, and some derivational affixes not addressed in earlier chapters, comprise 142 pages. These unexpanded chapters are perhaps exactly that: all the relevant information one would expect to find in a full-fledged reference grammar, presented in a succinct, direct style. It is in the first twenty-seven chapters, however, that we find the wealth of meticulous description (with many previously unrecorded facts), with attention devoted not just to general patterns but to many specific lexical items, diachronic information, and argumentation that make this book such an outstanding reference grammar for the language. Previous grammars of Basque written in English (e.g., Saltarelli et al. [1988] and Hualde and Ortiz de Urbina [2003], only the first of which was available to de Rijk), share with full reference grammars of betterstudied languages (e.g., Huddleston and Pullum [2003] for English, or Bosque and Demonte’s grammar of Spanish [1999]) the characteristic of resulting from teamwork by leading experts in the different areas covered. Few other scholars would have been able to singlehandedly complete such a wide-ranging and, at the same time, in-depth description of a language like Basque, with its quite long tradition of scholarship both within and outside the Basque Country. It took de Rijk close to twenty years to all but complete his major work, and linguists should be grateful to all those who made it possible to turn the incomplete manuscripts into a coherent reference grammar. Some uncommon features of the author’s profile as a linguist can help us better understand the descriptive approach taken in this grammar and some of the hidden theoretical assumptions that always, overtly or covertly, accompany such endeavors. He graduated from MIT in 1972 with a thesis on relativization in Basque directed by the late Kenneth Hale, and his early works mention both the latter and other teachers such as Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky. Yet his publications, although theoretically informed, hardly ever dealt with theory-internal issues, and often have, in fact, a distinctly philological outlook. His full command of Basque texts (and editions) from all ages and dialects is well reflected in the book reviewed here, which is studded with actual