Brendan Fairbanks examines the challenging subject of discourse markers in Ojibwe, one of the many indigenous languages in the Algonquian family. Mille Lacs elder Jim Clark once described the ...discourse markers as "little bugs that are holding on for dear life." For example, discourse markers such asmiiandgoshaexist only on the periphery of sentences to provide either cohesion or nuance to utterances. Fairbanks focuses on the discourse markers that are the most ubiquitous and that exist most commonly within Ojibwe texts.Much of the research on Algonquian languages has concentrated primarily on the core morphological and syntactical characteristics of their sentence structure. Fairbanks restricts his study to markers that are far more elusive and difficult in terms of semantic ambiguity and their contribution to sentences and Ojibwe discourse.Ojibwe Discourse Markersis a remarkable study that interprets and describes the Ojibwe language in its broader theoretical concerns in the field of linguistics. With a scholarly and pedagogical introductory chapter and a glossary of technical terms, this book will be useful to instructors and students of Ojibwe as a second language in language revival and maintenance programs.
Bawaajimo:A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literaturecombines literary criticism, sociolinguistics, native studies, and poetics to introduce an Anishinaabe way of reading. Although ...nationally specific, the book speaks to a broad audience by demonstrating an indigenous literary methodology. Investigating the language itself, its place of origin, its sound and structure, and its current usage provides new critical connections between North American fiction, Native American literatures, and Anishinaabe narrative. The four Anishinaabe authors discussed in the book, Louise Erdrich, Jim Northrup, Basil Johnston, and Gerald Vizenor, share an ethnic heritage but are connected more clearly by a culture of tales, songs, and beliefs. Each of them has heard, studied, and written in Anishinaabemowin, making their heritage language a part of the backdrop and sometimes the medium, of their work. All of them reference the power and influence of the Great Lakes region and theAnishinaabeakiing, and they connect the landscape to the original language. As they reconstruct and deconstruct theaadizookaan, the traditional tales of Nanabozho and other mythic figures, they grapple with the legacy of cultural genocide and write toward a future that places ancient beliefs in the center of the cultural horizon.
Anihsināpēmowin / Beginning Saulteaux is an introductory look at one of the most widely spoken of all North American Indigenous languages. The book consists of an easy to use and easy to read series ...of lessons, guiding beginners through the language's grammatical structures, spelling systems, and everyday terms and phrases.
Language learning and teaching (LLT) materials—like teacher‐created handouts, textbooks, and overhead transparencies—are central elements of language classrooms worldwide. Nonetheless, how language ...students and teachers actually engage with and deploy LLT materials has rarely been the focus of research. In response, this issue offers the first compilation of classroom‐based studies of ‘materials use’ in language education and includes research on Ojibwe, Japanese, French, and English language pedagogy. In this introductory article to the special issue, we set the stage for the 7 empirical articles by offering much‐needed definitions for the concepts of ‘LLT materials’ and ‘materials use.’ These definitions are based on a metasynthesis (i.e., an integrative qualitative analysis) of all of the materials used throughout the 7 empirical articles. Additionally, we explore sociomaterialism as a compelling and well‐suited framework for the study of materials in use. Sociomaterialism is not a unified theory but rather a research orientation that seeks to examine connections between the social and the material world. In addition to substantively and theoretically advancing the field, all the articles of this special issue also have practical implications for language pedagogy.
Distinctions related to person and animacy have long been known to impact both the grammar and incremental processing in a way that can be described through “prominence” scales. We put the ...generalizability of these scales to the test by examining the processing effects of a typologically uncommon distinction known as obviation, which is found in Ojibwe, an Indigenous language of North America. Obviation contrasts the single most discourse-salient animate third person (proximate) with other non-salient third persons (obviative). Using a visual world paradigm, we show that obviation influences parsing and interpretation commitments under incremental ambiguity: Proximate nouns are assumed to be the agent of an action, while obviative nouns do not lead to strong incremental commitments. This result parallels previous findings in other languages with distinctions related to animacy and person, supporting a theory where the effect of prominence information in processing is the result of a common set of constraints derived from the alignment of scales related to person, syntactic position, and thematic role.
•Animacy and personhood influence relative clause parsing cross-linguistically.•Ojibwe exhibits a unique “fourth person” category: Obivative referents.•We investigate relative clause processing with Ojibwe first speakers.•We find that proximate referents are immediately interpreted as agents.•Animacy/personhood effects on parsing generalize to obviation as well.
Jussive Constructions in Ojibwe Kishketon, Brendan
International journal of American linguistics,
01/2023, Letnik:
89, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper examines and documents the various types of jussive constructions occurring in Ojibwe, an endangered Algonquian language of North America. A jussive is a type of mediated command that ...tasks a second person interlocutor, real or imagined, to allow or ensure the fulfillment or realization of some event, condition, or state of being. This command has the force of the English let it rain or let me in. Rather than employing verbs instantiating permission, such as ‘let’ or ‘may’ in English, the principle jussive construction in Ojibwe is instantiated by verbs inflected for future (e.g., ga∼da) but without future meaning. This paper ultimately reveals that the use of the Ojibwe simple future as instantiating imperatives (an attested developmental pathway for some futures) facilitated the development of the principle jussive construction in Ojibwe.
Ecological approaches to language learning and materials use represent educational settings as complex and dynamic systems by applying relational perspectives from the natural world in the classroom. ...For young bilingual Ojibwe learners, the natural world (i.e., local, rural, and reservation land) is a significant language learning resource unto itself. In the underrepresented context of Indigenous language reclamation in the Upper Midwest of the United States, local land is central to ways of knowing and being, thus it is also central to learning. This study examines the ‘intra‐actions’ among land‐based materials, an Ojibwe Elder, and immersion school youth on local forestland. Focusing on the interrelated nature of human and nonhuman elements, we rely on Indigenous perspectives of relationality and sociomateriality to expand and clarify the roles of land in Indigenous language learning for reclamation. This study highlights Ojibwe practices of relational consensual engagement with the environment and has implications for materials use research, as it underscores the significance of the natural world as emergent language learning and teaching materials.
This article argues that Bamewawagezhikaquay, or Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, offers vital citations of Anishinaabe cosmologies, including lineages of human and nonhuman teachers and perspectives on ...animate archives that should inflect new approaches to textual studies. Bamewawagezhikaquay's writings express a citational cosmopolitics, a practice where Bamewawagezhikaquay invokes, and occasionally translates into English, human and more-than-human agents in the cocreation of Anishinaabe knowledge. In her descriptions of Anishinaabe plants and geographies, she models a citational praxis that intersects with resurgent frameworks on orienting to Anishinaabe writings, including birchbark maps and cliff paintings, not as inert objects but as dynamic nodal points in shared and ongoing acts of communication.
Number-based noun classification Kouneli, Maria
Natural language and linguistic theory,
11/2021, Letnik:
39, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Nilo-Saharan languages are well-known for their complicated system of nominal number marking, which features a variety of singulative and plural affixes (Dimmendaal 2000). Even though these systems ...have received some attention in the typological literature, there has been limited theoretical work on their implications for the morphosyntax of number cross-linguistically. The goal of this paper is to fill this gap, by providing an analysis of nominal number morphology in Kipsigis (Nilotic, Kenya), based on data from original fieldwork. First, I show that singulatives in Kipsigis are true allomorphs of singular number, unlike singulatives with a classifier function in languages like Ojibwe (Mathieu 2012). The descriptive term ‘singulative’ is therefore misleading, as it corresponds to two very different types of morphemes. Second, I claim that the tripartite system of number marking of Kipsigis and other Nilo-Saharan languages is due to the classification of nouns into morphosyntactic classes defined by the presence of inherent number features on little n; the interaction of these features with interpretable number features on the functional projection Num (Ritter 1991 a.o.) in the post-syntactic component gives rise to the exponence pattern that we observe. Finally, my analysis corroborates the existence of noun classification based on number, which has only been argued for Kiowa-Tanoan before (Harbour 2007). The existence of three number classes in Kipsigis can only be explained by reference to bivalent number features; number-based noun classification systems thus strongly support the view that number features are bivalent and not privative, which is also argued by Harbour (2007, 2011) for Kiowa.
Denominal Verbs in Algonquian LeSourd, Philip S.
Anthropological linguistics,
12/2020, Letnik:
62, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article proposes a lexical analysis of the derivation of denominal verbs of a type found widely in Algonquian languages: verbs of acquiring, which express the process by which the referent of ...the subject acquires tokens of items of the type named by the nominal on which the verb stem is based. Focusing on data from Ojibwe and Maliseet-Passamaquoddy, I argue against a proposed syntactic analysis of these verbs via noun incorporation, instead developing a lexical alternative; employing the mechanisms of Bochner’s (1993) Lexical Relatedness Morphology this allows us to track connections among lexical formations that follow related but distinct derivational patterns.
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