35.713, Review: The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America: Dagostino, Mithun & Rice (eds.) (2023)

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Subject: 35.713, Review: The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America: Dagostino, Mithun & Rice (eds.) (2023)

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Date: 02-Mar-2024
From: Matthew Windsor [matthew_windsor at sil.org]
Subject: Sociolinguistics: Dagostino, Mithun & Rice (eds.) (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.2843

EDITOR: Carmen Dagostino
EDITOR: Marianne Mithun
EDITOR: Keren Rice
TITLE: The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America
SUBTITLE: A Comprehensive Guide, Vol 1
SERIES TITLE: The World of Linguistics
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Matthew Windsor

SUMMARY

Based on the available documentation of Indigenous North American
(INA) languages, 54 identifiable language families are recognized in
the region (Campbell 2021). Many of these are known today only through
historical records, while many others continue to be spoken in small
communities scattered across the continent. The present volume adds to
previous handbook-style treatments by focusing on recent trends in
research, typologically unusual features, and topics important to
indigenous communities (p. v). The volume will be published in two
parts: the first, under review, contains 31 chapters treating topics
in linguistics. Part II, forthcoming, will feature issues in language
revitalization and present sketches of select languages and families.
A distinctive feature of the work is the editors’ goal to have
chapters written in an accessible way for indigenous communities and
those working in language revitalization.
In the following summary I will deliver a few points from each chapter
that I consider notable for potential readers; full abstracts are
available from the publisher’s website. Chapters marked with an
asterisk are those I particularly recommend for reference.
Part I, “Sounds and Sound Structure” contains seven chapters
introducing phonetics (acoustic and articulatory), tone, segmental
phonology, prosodic morphology, and prosody (within and beyond the
word).
In Chapter One, Bird, Claxton and Nolan introduce the field of
acoustic phonetics as it relates to language revitalization, including
how to begin recording and viewing waveforms. In comparison to other
world regions, there are fewer acoustic phonetic descriptions of INA
languages (of the sort published by the International Phonetic
Association). More thorough work is needed in this area.
Bliss, Bird, and Gick discuss articulatory phonetics in Chapter Two.
They overview modern methods used to study movement in the vocal
tract: video, ultrasound, laryngoscopy, palatography and aerodynamic
methods. Notable INA phenomena include “soundless vowels” pronounced
by speakers of Oneida (with visible lip gesture) and a “tongue
rolling” strategy (visible by ultrasound) used by a speaker of Central
Salish to pronounce difficult /iq/ and /qi/ sequences (p. 50).
Chapter Three on tone, by Uchihara, gives a practical heuristic for
discovering tonal contrasts. He discusses orthography before moving to
types of meaning and patterning. There are already several standard
resources available for studying tone, but a unique addition is the
summary of tonal features of INA languages, including a dedicated
bibliography.
Chapter Four on segmental phonology (Fitzgerald and Gordon) highlights
typological trends in INA, such as small vowel inventories and large
consonant inventories (in the Northwest Coast). Rare segments include
pharyngeals, uvulars, ejectives, laterals and glottalized nasals and
approximants. Some northwest languages feature contrastive use of
creaky voice.
Chapter Five treats prosodic morphology, that is, word patterns which
make reference to prosodic units of one kind or another. Urbanczyk
assumes a universal prosodic hierarchy and the structure of the
chapter reflects this. These complex morphological processes can be
difficult to know how to approach in language classrooms, but she
suggests some ideas for language games and advocates for more
pedagogical research.
Gordon covers word prosody in Chapter Six, which is based on his
previous typological work. In studying prosody it is essential to
distinguish between prominence at different prosodic levels. Word
prominence is often realized in the same way as phrase or
utterance-level prominence, and it is important to isolate the two.
Prosodic systems also change easily through language-internal shifts
(ex. Northern Iroquoian) or through language contact (ex. Michif).
*Chapter Seven by Siri Tuttle features prosody beyond the word. Tuttle
connects the inherent linguistic properties of pitch, duration and
loudness to the various uses they may have in demarking intonation
units and word units, as well as indicating different kinds of
prominence. She includes interesting examples from a wide range of
languages and includes the many ways intonation interacts with other
domains such as style in storytelling.
Part II contains two functional-typological oriented chapters
exploring issues in wordhood and word classes.
Zúñiga (*Chapter Eight) provides critical discussion of diagnostics
used to identify phonological and grammatical words and then outlines
the types of relationships between them. This chapter as well as his
other works on wordhood form a good starting point for understanding
issues of wordhood in the Americas.
Hieber’s *Chapter Nine on word classes gives an orientation to the two
broad theoretical approaches to word classes, then reviews major class
types. Two areas of debate have centered around the “locus of
categoriality” (whether some words or roots are unspecified for word
class) and the universality of the noun-verb distinction. His overview
is insightful and considers diachronic factors in the comparison of
different systems.
Part III treats sentence-level constructions, with chapters on syntax
within the clause, negatives, questions and requests, information
structure, relative clauses, subordination and switch-reference.
In Chapter 10, “syntax within the clause,” Broadwell addresses a
non-linguistics-trained audience. He narrows his broad topic to the
domains of possession and transitivity, overviewing some familiar
distinctions between head vs. dependent marking and types of
alignment.
In Chapter 11, van Gelderen summarizes some structural variables in
the marking of negation, largely based on published typological
studies. She discusses the use of negative affixes vs. negative
particles, issues of word order, auxiliaries, and interaction with
tense aspect and mood marking.
Chapter 12 by Lovick discusses questions (which seek a verbal
response) and requests  (which seek some action on the part of the
hearer). Compared to languages worldwide, INA languages more
frequently use specialized particles or verb paradigms to mark
questions rather than relying on intonation. Notable features include
elaborated sets of interrogative words (p. 286), the use of
lexicalized interrogative verbs, and first-person hortatives (‘I might
as well have tea!’ p. 292). Requests may differ within a language
according to factors including politeness, timing of execution, or
gender of the addressee.
In *Chapter 13 on information structure, Berge introduces the notions
of topic and focus, relating the general literature to the unique
contributions INA languages make to our understanding. Many of these
use complex morphology to help track topical references. Although many
initial descriptions of pragmatic word order predicted that given
information always precedes new information, the opposite order occurs
in a number of unrelated INA languages and this chapter updates the
list of these (p. 309).
In Chapter 14, Thornes narrows his topic to canonical restrictive
relative clauses (RCs) -- a construction he says is often absent in
natural speech of INA languages. Notable examples include Crow, where
a determiner suffix indicates RCs, and Slave, which formally
distinguishes definite from indefinite RCs. In Saanich an “attributive
construction” plays the role of RC but is not formally differentiated.
In Chapter 15, Dahlstrom discusses structural patterns in the marking
of subordinate clauses. Some interesting cases are Cherokee, which
distinguishes subordinate clauses using tone, and Kiowa, which merely
juxtaposes clauses rather than using any subordinate marking at all.
Intermediate cases of “cosubordination” combine characteristics of
subordination and coordination (Crow, Nootka).
Mckenzie in Chapter 16 covers switch-reference, a morphological
reference-tracking system which indicates whether a given clause
continues using the same subject as the previous clause. In many INA
languages, switch-reference markers have extended functions, sometimes
indicating event continuity rather than referential continuity.
Mckenzie also discusses related morphological strategies for
indicating inter-clausal coherence, such as obviation systems and
special reflexive markers in Eskimo-Aleut languages.
Part IV, on discourse, contains two chapters which provide excellent
points of departure for exploring the literature on verbal art and
conversation structure.
*Chapter 17, by Webster, is anthropological in orientation and covers
a wide array of phenomena under the heading of verbal art, defined as
uses of language considered artistic from the point of view of the
given speech community. He discusses features of genre, speech play
and poetic structuring. Language-specific genres include not only
stories and songs, but also “speaking with names” in Western Apache,
or the use of puns in Seneca or Navajo. Webster provides an excellent
up-to-date bibliography of sources documenting verbal art across North
America.
Conversation is the main way we use language everyday but is not yet
central to the way linguists describe language. *Chapter 18 by Sammons
brings together important work in this area, discussing three case
studies: the Tlingit conversation project, Kawaiisu conversations and
landscapes, and the Michif conversation project. In many INA contexts
speakers may feel insecure about their language use and this can make
it hard to record conversation. Some strategies shared include
bringing a baby along to get people talking and moving the recording
location to a place of community significance on the land.
Part V on meaning contains two chapters by Sally Rice on lexical
meaning and lexicography, as well as several chapters on common
grammatical meanings: evidentiality, pluractionality and
distributivity, mass and count nouns, expressions concerning sense of
place, tense and aspect, and pragmatics.
Chapter 19 by Sally Rice overviews themes in INA lexicalization
patterns, including units below and above the word. She highlights the
ways lexicalization patterns reflect aspects of culture -- how
particular languages frame different types of events differently or
use specific terminology in given domains. Many INA languages have
words which are only partly compositional and should be presented with
literal glosses which reflect the internal structure of morphemes
(e.g. ‘person-head-diminutive’) as well as the (often figurative)
conventionalized meaning of the whole word (e.g. ‘postage stamp’) (p.
466; example from Dene Sųłiné).
In Chapter 20 Rice then gives practical advice for creating
dictionaries. She emphasizes the advantages of technology for making
accessible products which can easily incorporate textual examples,
audio recordings, grammatical information and more. She recommends
listing not only whole words but also other units like morphemes and
idioms. A practical section demonstrates parallel entries from various
model dictionaries which are useful for helping the reader envision
what kind of product their own dictionary project could aim for.
In Chapter 21 on evidentials, Peterson surveys types of evidential
meanings and introduces methods for exploring them in a given
language. A few languages have evidential-like affixes with quite
concrete meaning, such as the final sensory suffixes in Ojibwe (e.g.
good-taste for ‘it tastes good’). He emphasizes the inaccuracy of
attempting to elicit evidentials via translation and instead
recommends semantic fieldwork methods such as creating stories and
describing hypothetical situations to isolate nuances of meaning.
In Chapter 22, Henderson covers pluractionality (roughly, pluralized
events) and distributivity (roughly, plural events performed on or by
different participants). In documentation he recommends the use of
video to capture gestures, controlling for the way lexical aspect
interacts with pluractionality, and having speakers demonstrate
pluralized actions using a prop.
Chapter 23 by Wilhelm covers count nouns and mass nouns, understood as
a semantic distinction which does not correspond to a well-established
grammatical subclass in most INA languages but nevertheless manifests
in various ways. In many languages, nouns referring to substances, for
example, may be counted but are then understood to refer to
individuated units of measurement. An interesting case is Koasati,
where number is not indicated directly on nouns but through a class of
suppletive plural verbs. “Mass nouns” in this case are distinct in
that they only occur with plural verbs, never singular ones.
Under the title “sense of place: space, landscape, and orientation”
Holton and Berez-Kroeker’s *Chapter 24 surveys diverse topics: spatial
orientation, demonstratives, topological relations, landscape
features, place naming, community mapping initiatives and recent
efforts to rename indigenous places of significance. Their
multifaceted approach mirrors the way indigenous communities often
approach a topic holistically -- without segregating issues of
language, culture, and land use.
*Chapter 25, by Chen and Matthewson, outlines important factors for
describing the semantics of tense, aspect and mode (TAM). The authors
include many examples of the ways INA languages lump or split semantic
distinctions and the ways TAM categories interact. For example,
Blackfoot eventive predicates (lexical aspect) are by default
interpreted as having happened in the past (tense).
In Chapter 26 on pragmatics, Bogal-Allbritten discusses conversational
implicature, politeness and presupposition, mainly relying on
published studies which treat these topics explicitly. A few
Algonquian languages are highlighted for studies which have explored
direct and indirect request strategies. Pacific Northwest languages
are highlighted for studies which have explored the language-specific
role of presuppositions.
Part VI “languages over space and time” treats topics in diachrony,
contact, classification, and sociolinguistic variation.
In *Chapter 27, Mithun shows how grammar emerges from “what speakers…
have chosen to express particularly frequently over long periods of
time” (p. 624). Drawing from primary language descriptions, she shares
examples of grammaticalization and examples of special elaboration
such as categories of lexical suffixes in Salishan and Wakashan. On
the topic of language contact, she shows how multilingual speakers
will transfer frequently used distinctions “into another language they
speak, even if they do not transfer the actual forms” (p. 643).
In *Chapter 28 Thomason surveys patterns of multilingualism, language
contact, borrowing and diffusion, mixed languages and linguistic
areas. Her discussion is one of the most comprehensive in that she
gives broad historical context and names each known contact language
and linguistic area. Her discussion of Indigenous-European contact is
the only place in this volume that explicitly explains the context of
residential schools and indigenous responses to language loss.
*Chapter 29 by Haynie gives a brief but representative survey of the
history and evolving methods of language classification in North
America. Her discussion is augmented by maps of early proposed
classifications. She integrates discussion of recent methods such as
Bayesian phylogenetic modeling, as well as debates such as the
Dene-Yeneseian hypothesis.
Chapter 30 by Spence looks at sociolinguistic variation as it can be
studied from archival materials. Working from archival materials
involves extra steps in interpreting each document critically and
evaluating what can be reliably inferred from it (i.e. the practice of
philology). For philological methods he refers the reader to a series
of recent dissertation grammars based on legacy materials of
Californian languages (p. 693).
Chapter 31 by Palakurthy covers sociolinguistic variation more
generally. She discusses geographic, age-based and gender-based
variation as well as community attitudes toward variation. It can be
difficult to distinguish relatively time-stable systems of variation
such as age-grading from language-wide changes in progress (p. 706).
Both Chapters 30 and 31 touch on this subject only briefly, though
this difficulty seems to be a relevant issue for many INA language
communities where elders hold a very distinct social role.
Finally, the volume also includes a set of maps reprinted (or redrawn)
from the Smithsonian’s Handbook of North American Indians series,
including a map of the whole continent from vol. 17 (Goddard 1996).

EVALUATION

This is a mammoth volume written by many of the leading linguists
working with INA languages today. Modern handbooks typically function
to help a reader break into the literature of a given field, and this
is where the chief value of the book lies. It makes an excellent
companion to some of the classic monographs on the area such as
Campbell (1997) or Mithun (1999), updating the reader on the breadth
of work being done today.
According to the goals of the editors, each chapter aimed to:
·       address a primary academic audience as well as a secondary
non-academic audience involved in community language revitalization;
·       include good cross-linguistic coverage as well as coverage of
current work being done;
·       connect the topic to language revitalization.
Many chapters also included a guide for what to investigate in
individual INA languages.
It is difficult to write for a dual audience, especially when
community audiences differ drastically from community to community
across the continent. Chapters can be divided according to whether the
author explicitly included (non-academic) community members in their
intended audience or whether they simply wrote with clear academic
style. Chapter 1 on acoustic phonetics, for example, includes
paragraphs headed “what you need to know” addressed to non-academic
readers. Many authors explicitly identify which sections of their
chapter will be useful to each audience. Mercifully, S. Rice was
allowed to write two chapters, both written in a cohesive style but
one addressing theoretical preliminaries (lexicalization) and the
other giving practical advice on creating dictionaries. Consequently,
individual chapters will vary in their appeal based on the reader’s
background, as the editors acknowledge in the preface.
The best community-oriented sections came from authors who have
extensive experience working alongside particular communities and were
able to include topics important to them. Chapter two included a
straightforward guide for community members to begin recording elders.
Others chose to highlight case studies from communities who are
heading their own initiatives (e.g. chapters 18, 20, 24). Some
integrated discussion of common situational or cultural factors that
affect working with elders in many INA communities. For example, often
the number of fluent speakers is small, elders hold a highly respected
social role, and speakers young and old may face significant emotional
barriers to speaking their language due to histories of linguistic
oppression. It was refreshing to see these factors integrated in a
natural way. Some more technical chapters integrated other “field
guide”-like advice or simple heuristics for community members working
to revitalize their language.
In my opinion, a handful of chapters struggled to address a clear
audience. These contained content most relevant to academic linguists
(e.g. structural grammatical surveys) but used a style addressed to
non-linguists. In my experience, most community practitioners are
concerned with how to apply concepts to one language, while
linguistics students and scholars dealing with multiple languages need
a more thorough introduction to the concepts complete with adequate
terminology.
Regarding cross-linguistic coverage, authors used different methods
for collecting examples from INA languages. Chapters can be grouped
loosely into those whose authors already perform a lot of
typological/areal comparison in their work, and those who conducted a
library study specifically for the writing of their chapter.
Identifiable methods involved: performing library and journal searches
(chapters 1, 26); consulting the results of published typological
studies and grammars (chapter 11), summarizing the author’s own
typological work (chapter 6, 8); drawing examples from the author’s
wide familiarity with the literature of the area (7, 17, 19, 27, 28);
or foregoing any survey due to the state of the field (chapter 2).
Authors also varied in the voice they gave to the large quantity of
historical language documentation. As the field of linguistics has
grown, the literature for each sub-field has grown increasingly
specialized. Some authors limit their discussion to more recent
literature explicitly addressing their topic (e.g. Chapters 1, 26,
31), while others also draw more widely from grammars and
structuralist-era descriptions (e.g. 7, 9, 17). These differences are
in part due to the nature of each topic -- some fields rely on modern
technology or recent theoretical approaches. However, Tuttle’s chapter
is a good example of what can be gained from reading whole
descriptions of languages. Even though her chapter covers a topic
often neglected in older grammars (prosody above the word) she manages
to wring out an impressive amount of information from them. She
writes, “these generalizations are not based on first impressions, but
often on decades of work by a linguist with a language community”
(p.162). Explaining the distinction between quantitative vs.
qualitative studies, she encourages the use of both.
Tuttle also tactfully addresses the temptation of some researchers to
search after their own ideal of an “authentic,” pre-contact, version
of a language while missing important questions about present-day
sociolinguistics and language contact. She and other authors also
acknowledge the role that language attitudes play at the community
level (e.g. p. 4, 89, 708). Many indigenous speakers place value on a
standard version of the language considered “authentic” in the eyes of
the community, and this ideal may be an important factor in language
revitalization.
Overall, it is exciting to see a book of this scope prioritizing
community-based linguistic work. For linguists working with indigenous
communities in long-term partnerships, it is rewarding when research
can be used to support community goals, and when indigenous
perspectives keep us asking grounded, holistically oriented questions.
I would recommend select chapters of this book for use with students,
language revitalization practitioners and linguists familiarizing
themselves with the state of the field in North America.

List of content errors:
References
o   Chapter 3 is missing Cruz & Woodbury 2014; Pike 1948 in the list
of references.
o   Chapter 13 is missing Berge 2015 in the list of references.
o   Chapter 14 is missing an in-text citation for Starks 1995.
o   Chapter 18 lists Spielman 1998 with the year 2017.
o   Chapter 30 is missing Jany 2009 in the list of references.
Text
o   Chapter 4 on segmental phonology contains typos in the consonant
inventory of Sm’álgyax. The alveolar affricates should be /ts’, ts,
dz/ (p. 93).
o   The Blackfoot language is mislabelled as Plains Cree on p. 317.
o   Ojibwe matwe- is a preverb/initial (type of loosely bound prefix),
not a suffix as represented on p. 503.
o   The phrase “number and animacy (i.e., obviation)” (p. 555) is
inaccurate. Obviation in Ojibwe is not equivalent to number and/or
animacy, though the categories are morphologically co-expressed.

REFERENCES

Campbell, Lyle. 1997. American Indian languages: The historical
linguistics of Native America (Oxford Studies in Anthropological
Linguistics 4). New York: Oxford University Press.

Campbell, Lyle. 2021. The historical study of American Indian
languages: A forty-year retrospective. In Lucy Thomason, David Costa &
Amy Dahlstrom (eds.), Webs of relationships and words from long ago: A
festschrift presented to Ives Goddard on the occasion of his 80th
birthday, 45–62. Petoskey: Mundart Press.

Goddard, Ives (ed.). 1996. Handbook of North American Indians, vol 17:
Languages. Washington: Smithsonian.

Mithun, Marianne. 1999. The languages of native North America
(Cambridge Language Surveys.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Matthew Windsor is a member of SIL and the resident linguist at
Mishamikoweesh Corp., based in Kingfisher Lake First Nation (Canada).
His publications include “The Rise of Unemphatic Negation” (2022) and
“Rhythm and Intonation in Oji-Cree” (forthcoming).



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