Some Syntactic Rules in Mohawk

Paul Martin Postal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315458557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The aim of this syntactic study, first published in 1979, is to formulate part of a generative grammar of Mohawk. A generative grammar is a finite set of explicit rules which enumerate the sentences of the language and which automatically assign to each sentence its correct grammatical analysis or structural description. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

Table of Contents

1. Cover
2. Half Title
3. Title
4. Copyright
5. Original Title
6. Original Copyright
7. Contents
8. CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
   1. I. Background
   2. II. Aims of the Present Work
   3. III. The Formal Devices of Grammatical Description
      1. A. Initial Remarks
      2. B. Grammatical Rules
      3. C. Simplicity and Notational Conventions
      4. D. Two Important Inadequacies
   4. IV. The Phonological Transcription
   5. V. Method of Presentation
9. CHAPTER 2: THE SUFFIX-TENSE SYSTEM
   1. I. Introduction
   2. II. The Forms of the Suffix - Tense System
   3. III. Phrase Structure Description of the Suffix-Tense System
   4. IV. Imperative Forms
   5. V. Some Additional Data
   6. VI. Conclusions: Description of the Suffix-Tense System
   7. VII. Appendix: Exclusively Phrase Structure Description of the Tense Prefixes
10. CHAPTER 3: THE PRONOMINAL PREFIXES OF VERBS
    1. I. Fundamentals
       1. A. Agreement
       2. B. The Relation of Typical Nominals to Verb Prefixes
    2. II. Intransitive Prefixes
       1. A. Initial Remarks
       2. B. Formal Analysis of the Intransitive Prefixes
    3. III. Transitive Prefixes
       1. A. Initial Remarks
       2. B. Non-Third Person Transitive Prefixes
       3. C. Third Person Transitive Prefixes
    4. IV. Further Prefix Rules
    5. V. Further Justification
       1. A. Initial Remarks
       2. B. A Formative Enumerating Phrase Structure Grammar of Mohawk Verb Prefixes
       3. C. The Inadequacy of a Non-Transformational Formative Enumerating Grammar
11. CHAPTER 4: THE NOMINAL AND INCORPORATION
    1. I. Introduction
    2. II. The Nominals Associated with We-Form Verb Prefixes and Second Person Verb Prefixes
    3. III. Modifiers and Incorporation
       1. A. Incorporation: Initial Facts
       2. B. The Possessive Construction
       3. C. The Possessive Construction, Incorporation, and Deletion
       4. D. The Possessive Construction: Conclusions
       5. E. Incorporation: Conclusions
       6. F. Demonstratives
       7. G. Numeral Phrases
       8. H. Relative-Like Phrases
       9. I. Interrelations of the Modifier Rules
       10. J. The Rules of Deletion
       11. K. Mohawk Incorporation and the Empirical Inadequacy of Phrase Structure Grammars
12. CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION
    1. I. Miscellaneous Grammatical Details
    2. II. The Correct Rules
       1. A. Initial Remarks
       2. B. Mohawk Phrase Structure
       3. C. Transformational Rules
          1. 1. Recursive Transformations
          2. 2. Optional Singulary Transformations.
          3. 3. Obligatory Syntactic Transformations.
          4. 4. Morphophonemic Rules
13. Bibliography

Chapter 1
Introduction

I. Background

Mohawk is one of the five Northern Iroquoian languages still spoken. The Caughnawaga (kahnawa?ke) dialect of this language is spoken chiefly on a reservation of the same name outside the city of Montreal. This dissertation is a grammatical study of this dialect based on approximately twelve months of field work carried out over a period of two years from June 1959 to June 1961.¹⁾ Six months of this work was done at Caughna-waga in Quebec, Canada. The rest was done at various times with speakers who live in New York City. This field research was supported by three grants from the Department of Anthropology of Yale University, and by a grant from the American Philosophical Society, Committee on the Phillips F und.

A number of brief studies of various dialects of Iroquoian²⁾ were made before the development of modern descriptive or structural linguistics. Of these that of Barbeau (1915) is the most useful as well as the most recent.³⁾ Within the tradition of modern linguistics there have been two large-scale published studies of Iroquoian: that by Lounsbury (1953) on Oneida, and more recently that by Chafe (1960b; 1961) on Seneca. Chafe (1960a) has also written a theoretical article on synchronic grammar based on Seneca material. Very sketchy work on Seneca has been done by Holmer (1952a; 1952b; 1953; 1954) and a brief study of this language by Voegelin and Preston (1949) has also appeared. Recently, Lounsbury (1961) has discussed a few aspects of Mohawk grammar for a non-technical audience. It should be emphasized that Mohawk and Oneida are quite closely related languages, so much so that we shall feel free at times to refer to Lounsbury's Oneida discussions without special note of the fact that they do not refer to Mohawk. Mohawk and Seneca, on the other hand, are much more distantly related.

Despite their many differences, all of the studies just referred to have in common the fact they they restrict attention to morphological and phonological matters. None of them deals with syntax. The present study is directed to this essentially unexplored area of Iroquoian grammar. By virtue of the choice of subject matter alone then, the present work is already set somewhat apart from past investigations within Iroquoian. In addition to the differences in subject matter, however, a certain lack of comparability between this and past investigations in this linguistic field is caused by a rather sharp difference in aim.

II. Aims of the Present Work

The aim of the following syntactic study is to formulate part of a generative grammar of Mohawk. A generative grammar is a finite set of explicit rules which enumerate the sentences of the language and which automatically assign to each sentence its correct grammatical analysis or structural description. By the latter notion we understand the set of elements of which the sentence is composed on the various linguistic levels, transformation, phrase, morpheme, phoneme, etc., their relations to one another, the formal relations of the sentence to other sentences, etc. The assignment of sentencehood or grammaticalness can be taken to be the most general feature of the structural description. The structural description of a sentence must then include all those grammatical features which are necessary to explain how the sentence is used and understood. A generative grammar has two components. The first or syntactic component recursively enumerates an infinite set of strings of elements we shall call formatives' together 'with their associated grammatical descriptions. The second or phonological component maps each string of formatives into a universal phonetic representation which is the ultimate level of linguistic description proper.

Although I shall not attempt to characterize the no doubt diverse aims of past work within Iroquoian, it is quite clear that these do not include the construction of sets of explicit structure assigning rules. Nor has this aim been a feature of modern grammatical descriptions generally. In view of this, it is perhaps not superfluous to state why we have chosen this as our conception of grammatical description. And for this purpose it is necessary to say a few words about what I take to be the aims of grammatical study generally.

Ultimat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Bibliography