Summary of research regarding Salish acquisition

[Rachel Chung]

Dear Childes readers,

I have been fortunate to have heard from several Salish experts in
response to my question about Salish acquisition. Salish is interesting
because some researchers think it lacks a distinction between verb and
noun. I was interested in finding implications about the development of
syntactic categories. Unfortunately it seems to be a fact that children no
longer learn Salishan languages as L1. Neverthelss, the responses I
received have pointers to other potential languages to look at. Dr. Sally
Thomason also has a good summary of the current state of affairs of the
question about verb/noun distinction in these languages. Below is a
summary of the responses I have received. I must thank Drs. David Beck,
Clifton Pye, David Ingram, and Sally Thomason for answering my question.

- Rachel Chung

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>From Clifton Pye:
The reason you didn't find any developmental papers on these languages is
because there are no longer any children learning these languages. I was
unable to find any children learning Salish languages in British Columbia
between 1983 and 1985. Perhaps there are a few families teaching the
languages to their children since then, but I haven't heard of any.

Clifton Pye
Linguistics
The University of Kansas
Lawrence, KS  66045


>From David Ingram:
You may wish to contact Cliff Pye at U Kansas (Linguistics) or Henry Davis
at the University of British Columbia (Linguistics) who both know about
Salish languages and language acquisition. Cliff Pye came to Canada several
years ago to study Salish language acquisition, but was unable to find
children still acquiring any of the languages. He ended up studying the
acquisition of Chilcotin. He did manage to make some tapes of two children
learning Thompson but nothing came of it. The unfortunate truth of the
matter is that there are no longer children acquiring them as a first
language as far as I know.

---
David Ingram, Chair
Department of Speech and Hearing Science
P.O. Box 870102
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-0102
Voice: 602/965-2905    Fax: 602/965-8516
Email: David.Ingram at asu.edu

>From David Beck:
Hello. Someone passed on your message to me. Unfortunately, there is very
little work done on acquisition in Salishan languages -- you might try
writing to Henry Davis at UBC, I think someone there might have done a
little. I should warn you though that most people work work on Salishan
langauges these days do think there is a distinction between noun and verb.
the position that there isn't has never been fuly accepted and is becoming
increasingly disfavoured as our notions of what nouns and verbs are becomes
more sophisticated.
It might also interest you to know that there are other languages where the
claim has been made that there are no nouns or verbs, and many of these
have living speech communities and so would be more fruitful for research
into language acquisition than is Salish (which really has no children
learning it as a native language). These languages include Tongan, Tagalog,
Munda (aka Mundari) and Tarascan (aka Purepechua). The first two have tens
of thousands of speakers.

======================================================================
David Beck
Assistant Professor
Department of Linguistics
University of Alberta
4-45 Assiniboia Hall
Edmonton, AB T6G 2E7
office: (780) 492-0807
FAX:    (780) 492-0806
e-mail: dbeck at ualberta.ca
homepage: http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbeck

>From Sally Thomason:

References on the debate of whether these languages distinguish noun and
verb:
AGAINST a noun/verb distinction in Salishan lgs.:

M. Dale Kinkade.  1983.  Salish evidence against the universality
  of "noun" and "verb".  LINGUA 60:25-39.

Eloise Jelinek & Richard Demers.  1994.  Predicates and pronominal
  arguments in Straits Salish.  LANGUAGE 70:697-736.

FOR a noun/verb distinction in Salishan lgs.:

Thom Hess & Jan van Eijk.  1985.  Noun and verb in Salishan.  Paper
  presented at the 20th International Conference on Salish and
  Neighboring Languages, Vancouver, BC, 15-17 August.  (This paper
  presumably appeared in the conference working-papers volume.)

Hamida Demirdache & Lisa Matthewson.  1995.  On the universality of
  syntactic categories.  In PROCEEDINGS OF THE 25TH ANNUAL MEETING
  OF THE NORTH EASTERN LINGUISTIC SOCIETY, pp. 79-93.  Amherst:
  Graduate Linguistics Association of the University of Massachusetts.

...See also Paul D. Kroeber's 1997 article "Relativization in Thompson
River Salish (ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS 39:376-422.  On p. 379
Kroeber comments that the "for" people `argue -- convincingly to
my [= Kroeber's] mind -- that morphological and syntactic differences,
though subtler than in European languages, justify distinguishing
"noun", "verb", and other lexical classes.'

   I'm not sure Kroeber is accurately representing the Jelinek &
Demers argument, though: as I recall (I'm back in Montana for the
summer and don't have the journal at hadn to check), they argue that
there is a SYNTACTIC noun/verb distinction, or at least a NP/VP distinction,
but maybe no LEXICAL noun/verb distinction.

   My own view, for what it's worth, is that the syntactic distinction
probably exists, but there's still a real question, for some or all
Salishan lgs., about a lexical distinction.  And even if there is a
lexical distinction, it's a LOT weaker than the noun/verb distinction
in any other language I've encountered.

  But I note that your query suggests that you might expect a
"noun advantage" in acquisition: that's puzzling, because the whole
point about Salishan stems/words is that they can all occur as predicates
and can all take elaborate *verbal* morphological apparatus.  That is,
if any category is actually missing, it's nouns, not verbs.

  In any case, my colleague asked if I knew of any research on L1
acquisition of any Salishan lg.  I don't, unfortunately.  It's too
late to do any such research now on any of the languages, with the
possible exception of one or more of the ones in BC -- Shuswap,
Lillooet, Thompson, possibly Bella Coola...I don't actually know the
status of the other coastal lgs. (all the ones I just mentioned are
interior, except Bella Coola), but I'd be surprised if any children
were learning any of them as an L1, and i'm not even sure that any
of the four languages I mentioned has that status.

  So that's what I can tell, you, only about a year later than you
needed the information.  I'm really sorry.

  OH: the people most likely to know about possibilities for L1
acquisition research (in existence or in the future) are mostly at
UBC -- Henry Davis, Hamida Demirdache (I *think* she's still there),
Dale Kinkae (now retired, but still active), and Pat Shaw.  Lisa
Matthewson isn't at UBC at present -- or, at least, she's been
teaching this past year at U Mass, but she's going back to UBC
next year, I believe. The only relevant email address I have is
Kinkade's: mdkd at interchange.ubc.ca (Davis, Demirdache,
Matthewson -- none of them is a member of either the LSA or SSILA,
the Native American ling. association).  But Dale will probably
know, and if not he can put you in touch with people who will
surely know.  (You can also probably get Davis's email address,
at least, from the UBC website.)