A Methodology for the Investigation of Speaker’s Knowledge of Structure in Athabaskan
Joyce M. McDonough, Rachel Shirley Sussman · Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society · 2014
This paper reports on a developing methodology for the investigation of the structure of the lexicon in Athabaskan, a set of closely related, morphologically complex languages spoken in North America. One important question that arises in morphologically complex, polysynthetic languages concerns a native speaker’s working knowledge of word structure. In polysynthetic languages, how aware are speakers of theoretically driven units, such as domains within the word, or morphemes and morpheme boundaries assumed by composite word formation theories. While a great deal is known about lexical access in languages like English, what does lexical access look like in Athabaskan. Are there parts of the word that are frozen (such as semantic units like the ‘verb bases’ in Athabaskan parlance), do speakers have more access to more phonologically and semantically distinct morphemes such as content morphemes and stems than aspectual categories like ‘repetitive’. Understanding these aspects of the lexicon may provide essential evidence in determining theories of word formation, for instance, and in phonological theory, as well as the more prosaic and far-reaching work in the documentation of understudied languages.