Glossary of Athabaskan terms

[Andrea Berez]

Great idea, James. Confused Athabaskanists, step forward!

Many thanks to Andrej, Willem and Bill for clarifying what needs to be done,
and I agree for the most part with Bill's classification of terms.

In regards to Bill's list, personally I have found the distinction between
conjugation-aspect-mode to be a bit daunting, at least in terms of
distinguishing and/or predicting conjunct morphology. So I'd like to see
each of those terms sorted out in relation to the other two.

Also root-stem-base-theme is clearly described for Athabaskan in Cook &
Rice's 1989 introduction, but I have always wondered how well Athie senses
of 'base' and 'theme' line up with the general linguistics literature. Might
be nice to compare.

So are we signing up to volunteer for terms yet?

~Andrea
-----------------------------
Andrea L. Berez
PhD candidate, Dept. of Linguistics
University of California, Santa Barbara
http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~aberez/ <http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/%7Eaberez/>


On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 6:01 PM, William J Poser <wjposer at ldc.upenn.edu>wrote:

> I think that this is a good idea, but as Andrij and Willem suggest, I think
> that a finer classification of the difficulties with these terms is needed.
> Off the cuff, I see no problem with these:
>
> areal
> classificatory verb
> conjugation
> derivational potential
> discontinuity
> distributive
> optative
> root
> semelfactive
> stem
> verb word
>
> The ones that are actually misleading are:
>
> classifier
> gender
> iterative
> thematic prefixes
>
> A peculiar case is "deictic", which as far as I can see is used by its
> advocates
> in a sense consonant with its usage elsewhere in linguistics. The problem
> with it is that it is arguably descriptively wrong.
>
> "customary aspect" is quite appropriate as it is used for some languages
> and
> is so appropriate descriptively that I would be reluctant to give it up.
> The problem is that some authors conflate "customary" and "habitual".
> The guilty parties should stop this.
>
> The following seem to me to be specialized but appropriate, or at least not
> misleading to non-specialists:
>
> conjunct
> D-effect
> disjunct
> fourth person
> peg element
> qualifier
> verb base
> verb theme
> y-/b- pronouns
>
> I have no opinion on the following. Indeed, at the risk of displaying my
> ignorance, what is the technical Athabascanist usage of "multiple"?
>
> mode
> multiple
> subject and object (as applied to affixes)
> transitional
>
> Bill
>
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