Fwd: relative roots

[Wayne Leman]

Re: Fwd: relative rootsI agree with Rich on this. And I prefer using an English definite as I gloss relative roots in our Cheyenne dictionary. Early in my work on Cheyenne I used the Bloomfieldian "thus" but after awhile I realized it didn't make much sense to many English speakers, not to mention Cheyenne speakers for whom we want the dictionary to be user-friendly.

Hence:

Enêheseve 'he did it that way'
Ehevoo'o 'that's what he said'

Wayne Leman
  Monica,
          There are a couple of considerations with relative roots. As I have been arguing for about ten years now (and no one seems to notice), relative roots have properties that suggest they are analogous to head marking. What I mean is the following.


          We translate simple transitive verb forms with something that suggests the object slot which must be filled.


          waabamaad       vta     'see s.o./s.t. (an.)'


  Since relative roots analogously license clausal complements, we should gloss them analogously with appropriate indefinites:


          inaabid         vai     'look in a certain direction'
          inaabamaad      vta     'see s.o./s.t. (an.) looking like s.t.'
          apatood         vai     'run along a certain route'
          onjinawaad      vta     'kill s.o. for a certain reason'


  But with 20/20 hindsight, because the head markings all have null definite readings, it would probably be more accurate to gloss them with definites.


          waabamaad       vta     'see him/her/it (an.)'


  and


          inaabid         vai     'look in that direction'
          inaabamaad      vta     'see him/her/it (an.) looking like that'
          apatood         vai     'run along that route'
          onjinawaad      vta     'kill him/her/it for that reason'


  I used the indefinite option in my dictionary, but I'm thinking that if I had it to do over again, I'd go with definites.


  Rich










  At 6:42 PM -0500 4/18/06, Monica Macaulay wrote:
    I got this very helpful message from David Costa and since it just came to me am taking the liberty of forwarding it to the list.  I think the list is set up so that replies just go to the sender and not the list, which is silly.  I'll check into changing that.


    - Monica



    Begin forwarded message:


      From: David Costa <pankihtamwa at earthlink.net>
      Date: April 18, 2006 3:06:48 PM CDT
      To: Monica Macaulay <mmacaula at WISC.EDU>
      Cc: Daryl Baldwin <baldwidw at muohio.edu>
      Subject: Re: relative roots


      Monica:


        We're currently going through the archaic English words that  Bloomfield used
        in his Menominee lexicon and trying to come up with  more colloquial
        defintions.  While thinking about 'thus' and what we  could replace it with, I
        realized that there's an intersecting  problem, which is due to the fact that
        all of the verbs that have  'thus' in their definition - not surprisingly -
        have the relative  root aeN- in them.  We were going to change 'thus' to 'in
        that  manner' but it occurs to me that that might be interpreted as a
        complete definition.  So, take the verb that Bloomfield translates as  'it
        glows thus' - we could change it to 'it glows in that manner' but  a
        dictionary user might not realize that it's a verb that needs a  manner adverb
        - and that using it without one would actually be  ungrammatical to a native
        speaker.  Conversely they might not realize  how to translate it in a
        sentence; i.e. if you used this verb with  'brightly' the meaning would be 'it
        glows brightly' - NOT 'it glows  brightly in that manner' or something like
        that.  Have any of you  wrestled with this one and come up with a good
        solution?


      Well, it seems to me that the 'thus'/'in that manner' dilemma and the worry
      about people thinking the gloss is a complete definition are separate
      issues. In our Miami dictionary, we used 'thus' a lot, but I think that was
      just because it's all over the Algonquian literature that way and we're so
      used to it. Perhaps in retrospect '(in) that way' or 'so' might have been a
      bit more user-friendly since 'thus' is such a marginal word in modern spoken
      English.


        A related issue of course is how much info one puts into a dictionary  without
        crossing over the line into being a grammar.  I think we  probably are all
        making somewhat different decisions about where to  draw that line, and I
        haven't decided yet where it would be drawn in  a case like this.


      And this is the second issue! I think the problem of speakers not knowing
      exactly how to use a word grammatically just based on its dictionary
      definition is just unavoidable. In my opinion, at the most one could write
      'relative root' in the gloss along with the form class, then in the intro
      refer the user to a grammatical sketch somewhere; or one could explain in
      the intro that when a word has that prefix and 'thus' (or 'in that manner',
      or whatever) in its gloss, here's what it means, and see the grammatical
      sketch. Explaining the details of how to use a relative root ninety
      different times in a dictionary would just drive people crazy, and they'd
      just have to refer to the grammar anyway.


      I've encountered people (not Miamis!) who want Native American languages to
      be spelled just like English, so that they supposedly won't have to learn
      any pronunciation rules. When one learns any new language, one has to master
      that language's spelling and pronunciation idiosyncracies, and one does not
      have the right to expect the rules to be the same as English. Grammar is
      the same way -- I've also had people (again, not Miamis) ask "can't we learn
      this language without any grammar?" The answer is no, of course --
      Algonquian grammar is SO different from English grammar, anyone who wants to
      make meaningful use of an Algonquian dictionary is going to have to
      familiarize themselves with a certain amount of grammar. Using a dictionary
      of Spanish or Polish or Swahili would be the same way. And you can't
      make grammar totally transparent in a dictionary.


      Anyway, I hope these comments are useful.


      Dave












    Monica Macaulay
    Department of Linguistics
    University of Wisconsin
    1168 Van Hise Hall; 1220 Linden Drive
    Madison, WI  53706
    phone (608) 262-2292; fax (608) 265-3193
    http://ling.wisc.edu/~macaulay/monica.html




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   Richard A. Rhodes
   Department of Linguistics
   University of California
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