Fw: List of Athabaskanist terminology

[Andrej A. Kibrik]

(I am resending this once again, it seems it has not reached the list last time)

I think this is a great undertaking. I have been concerned about the bizarre 
Athabaskanist terminology since the very beginning of my interest in these 
languages. I would propose that this resourse also contains suggestions on 
altering obscure terms and replacing them by more transparent and more 
generally acceptable ones. As I mentioned once in a paper, two major 
typological studies failed to notice the transitivity/valence morpheme in 
front of the root and pictured the Athabaskan languages accordingly. No 
doubt this is because of the "classifier" term. That is, our obscure 
terminology is largely responsible for non-Athabaskanists being unable to 
understand a bit about these languages, which is, to my mind, no good at 
all. Nothing in this world is for ever, and this includes Athabaskanist 
terms. Why don't we change them to more sensible ones? I have been 
suggesting "transitivity indicator", or TI, instead of "classifier".

A few additional items for the list that immediately come to mind:

mode
subject and object (as applied to affixes)
deictic
fourth person
peg element
transitional

Actually, some of the terms on the list below are quite normal from the 
cross-linguistic point of view, such as distributive or iterative, and I am 
not sure they need to be included. Some are Athabaskan innovations, and very 
fortunate ones, such as Kari's disjunct and conjunct.

Andrej Kibrik



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James Crippen" <jcrippen at GMAIL.COM>
To: <ATHAPBASCKAN-L at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Sent: Friday, October 02, 2009 7:22 AM
Subject: List of Athabaskanist terminology


> Here's the headwords from Keren Rice's glossary she handed out at the
> LSA 2009 Institute in Berkeley this summer.
>
> areal
> classificatory verb
> classifier
> conjugation
> conjunct
> customary aspect
> D-effect
> derivational potential
> disjunct
> discontinuity
> distributive
> gender
> iterative
> multiple
> optative
> qualifier
> root
> semelfactive
> stem
> thematic prefixes
> verb base
> verb theme
> verb word
> y-/b- pronouns
>
> This is a good start, but I know that there are other things out
> there, like distributive, mode, conative, ...
>
> Reply with your suggested terms, I'll start adding them to a Google
> Doc and post the link in a followup.
>
> James 


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