16.1245, Review: Lang Description/Amerindian: Sakel (2004)

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Subject: 16.1245, Review: Lang Description/Amerindian: Sakel (2004)

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1)
Date: 19-Apr-2005
From: Olesya Khanina < o.khanina at mtu-net.ru >
Subject: A Grammar of Mosetén 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2005 13:39:10
From: Olesya Khanina < o.khanina at mtu-net.ru >
Subject: A Grammar of Mosetén 
 

AUTHOR: Sakel, Jeannette 
TITLE: A Grammar of Mosetén 
SERIES: Mouton Grammar Library 33 
PUBLISHER: Mouton de Gruyter 
YEAR: 2004 
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-3328.html


Olesya Khanina, Moscow State University, Philological Faculty & Max Planck 
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Linguistics

This book is the first comprehensive description of a language of the 
Mosetenan family. The family consists of 3 languages forming a dialect 
continuum where adjacent languages are mutually comprehensible: Moseten of 
Covendo - Moseten of Santa Ana - Chimane. They are spoken in Bolivia 
(South America) by 600, 150-200 and 4000 people, respectively. Genetic 
affiliation of Mosetenan to other language families remains unclear, even 
though some hypotheses have been proposed in the literature (grouping with 
Chon-Ona and Tehuelche by Swadesh (1963); with Pano-Tacanan and further 
with Chona and Yuracare by Suarez (1969); including in Ge-Pano-Carib and 
then to Amerindian macrofamily by Greenberg (1987)). This state of affairs 
isn't actually surprising, as before the current grammar hardly any 
language data on the whole Mosetenan family was accessible to the 
linguistic community. That's why the grammar under review is not only a 
high-quality language description that surely will be actively used by 
typologists of all sorts, but also an invaluable point of reference for 
comparative studies of South American languages.

The Grammar of Moseten was written by Jeanette Sakel as her PhD thesis at 
University of Nijmegen and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary 
Anthropology (Leipzig) and was published in the Mouton Grammar Library 
series without any substantial change. It describes mainly the Covendo 
dialect of Moseten spoken in the foothills of the Andes, in La Paz 
Department. The language data comes from the author's own fieldwork, but 
it includes also materials resulted from her close collaboration with a 
number of native speakers who recorded the language varieties which were 
beyond the reach of an outsider linguist.

SYNOPSIS

The book contains 13 chapters, a list of abbreviations, some maps and 
Appendix with 3 Moseten texts, statistics of word order patterns' 
occurrence in written texts and a list of grammatical markers with 
meanings and relevant pages in the grammar. In addition to general 
references, there are 9 pages of bibliography concerned with all the 
aspects of Mosetenan culture. I will report one by one about all the 
chapters, highlighting the aspects of Moseten that may be of interest to 
typologists and theoreticians. I'll try to avoid, where possible, 
commenting on the author's strongs and weeks: it will follow in the 
critical evaluation.

Chapter 1, "Introduction" presents the language, its genetic affiliation, 
sociolinguistic situation, previous research and history and method of 
current research. It concludes with an informative 2-page synopsis of main 
structural characteristics of Moseten.

Chapter 2, "Phonology" introduces the reader to segmental and 
suprasegmental phonology and to the orthography of the language. Moseten 
of Covendo has 10 vowel phonemes (i, e, mid central unrounded 'shwa', o, a 
+ their nasal counterparts), the length is phonemic only for the first 
three of them - for nasalized as well as for oral. There are 24 consonant 
phonemes, for some of them aspiration and palatalization is phonemic. The 
syllable structure is (C)V(C) with only the vowel being obligatory; no 
consonant clusters are possible, except 'm/n/r + glottal stop' at the end 
of the syllable. However, loans can violate this syllable structure. All 
affixes have nasal and oral variants and thus are subject to vowel nasal 
harmony governed by the root vowels. In addition, a restricted number of 
verbal roots (about 15) manifest vowel assimilation induced by certain 
cross-reference markers. Its nature being, unfortunately, not specified by 
the author, the place of the stress is the first syllable of the root with 
few exceptions. At last, a number of morphophonological changes occur at 
morpheme boundaries and all of them have nothing unexpected from 
typological point of view.

In 9-pages Chapter 3, "Morphological processes", Sakel gives the reader a 
general overview of morphosyntactic inventory of Moseten. The language 
makes an extensive use of suffixes, clitics and reduplication, while 
prefixes and infixes are very few. Verbs differ significantly from other 
parts of speech: "most of the verbal roots are bound morphemes that have 
to be followed by a verbal stem marker to be turned into an element to 
which inflectional markers can be added" (p.53).

Chapter 4, "The nominal system", describes nominal grammatical categories 
and derivation of nouns from nouns/verbs and explores noun phrase 
structure. Nouns are reported to have one of two genders that are 
inflected on other constituents of the NP, being as well often, but not 
always, represented in the cross-reference ending of the verb. While the 
masculine is less marked formally, the feminine surprisingly appears to be 
unmarked functionally: a group of people of different gender are referred 
to as 'feminine plural', the feminine form of benefactive is used to refer 
to any group of people (even exclusively men!), when their gender is not 
focused, and verbs taking object complement clauses receive feminine 
object marking. There are two numbers, the singular being formally 
unmarked and the plural marked by a clitic or by global/partial 
reduplication of the root. Moseten nouns don't inflect for case, but there 
are a number of 'case-resembling' clitics: local (adessive, 
inessive, "downriver", superessive), instrumental, comitative, 
associative, benefactive, 'only', 'former'. They are attached first to 
determiner, if no, to modifiers, if no, to head NP itself; in addition, 
they can appear as words on their own. At last, there are two possible 
noun-to-noun derivations: the augmentative, marked by a prefix, and the 
diminutive, marked by a lexically determined change of the 
quality/nasality of the root (stem?) vowels (the latter can be applied as 
well to other parts of speech, except verbs). The main feature of Moseten 
NP structure is that modifiers (adjectives, relative clauses, possessors) 
carry the so-called 'linker morpheme', i.e. a marker of nominal syntactic 
dependency, which appears after 'case' clitics. The elements of NP can be 
linearly split, e.g. by a verb, for focus purposes.

Chapter 5, "Pronouns and reference", is concerned with all types of 
reference maintenance. Personal pronouns can be used on their own or can 
be cliticized to a verb or to a possessed noun. Here, they show a high 
flexibility: cliticized to a verb, they can refer both to the subject and 
to the object, and cliticized to a possessed noun, they can agree in 
person, number and gender both with the possessor and the possessum. The 
other way to encode possession is to mark the personal pronoun with 
the 'linker morpheme' obtaining, thus, a possessive pronoun. There are two 
demonstrative pronouns - masculine and feminine - that can refer both to 
animates and inanimates (the same holds true for personal pronouns). 
Moseten has an extensive class of interrogative pronouns that, being 
themselves constructed on the base of a single root (with one or two 
exceptions), function at the same time as the first part of indefinite 
pronouns (the second is indefiniteness markers) and as negative 
quantifiers in the context of markers of negation. A couple of 
interrogative pronouns can also be used as relative and adverbial clause 
markers. Finally, apart from a number of reference tracking pronouns, 
Moseten has a nice 'proform' used as a filler in discourse when a speaker 
isn't sure about the content of the word, but knows it syntactic status: 
various derivational and inflectional markers can be then added to it in 
order to express the desired syntactic function.

Chapter 6, "Adjectives and adverbs", consists of a number of general 
remarks about these parts of speech: their different syntactic functions, 
their derivational patterns and comparison techniques. However, the 
existence of true separate classes of adjectives and adverbs and their 
differentiation from stative verbs and nouns isn't properly presented and 
lacks if not argumentation, at least clarity. There seem actually to be a 
true separate class of adjectives, but in the light of overwhelming 
typological discussion of adjectives that have been occurring the last 
decade (cf., among others, Bhat 1994, Dixon & Aikhenvald 2004, Whetzer 
1992), a general linguist would expect the 2004 grammar to be more 
pronouncing on the matter.

Chapter 7, "Quantification", gives an account of the numeral system and 
quantifiers. The former forms "a decimal system, which may have arisen 
from a quinary system" (p.167).

Chapter 8, "The verbal system", and Chapter 9, "Voice", treat the Moseten 
verb. Remembering quite agglutinative nature of the language, it's 
possible to describe a typical morpheme structure of the verb, even though 
it appears to be rather complex. It consists of a (bound) root followed by 
a 'verbal stem marker', then eventually by associated motion and/or voice 
markers, then eventually by aspect markers and obligatory by cross-
reference endings. In addition, the root can be sometimes preceded by 
causative and applicative prefixes. Unfortunately, the relative order of 
the suffixes of different categories is not discussed in the book, so for 
some cases - like associated motion and voice - it remained unclear (the 
reader might be able to find the answer in numerous examples all over the 
grammar, although the superficial check by the reviewer didn't succeed).

Verbal stem markers derive verbal stems from bound verbal roots and other 
parts of speech: the choice of one of six possible markers entails the 
level of transitivity and of subject participant control over the event; 
for a number of verbs, the choice procedure is claimed to be lexicalized. 
In the footnote (f.167, p.477), the author draws a parallel between these 
markers and 'light verbs' and 'verbal classifiers' of other languages, but 
doesn't explain what is the difference between them and Moseten stem 
markers, if any. Unbound roots are very few, about 15-20. The final of the 
stem marker further determines which allomorph of 
derivational/inflectional suffix will be used; this information is also 
lexicalized to a great extent (e.g. the stems ending in -ki can be 
either "consonantal" or "vowel" (p.202)).

There are six affixes of 'associated motion': four of them refer to the 
movement to/from a deictic center ('go away to do an action', 'come to do 
an action', 'to perform on the way there', 'to perform on the way here'), 
one is a distributive ('movement in several directions to perform an 
action' - cf. reduplication distributive 'action performed in several 
locations') and the last one is used only in combination with some of the 
deictic suffixes above ('interrupted movement').

Moseten voices are reported to be causative, applicative, middle, 
antipassive, passive and reflexive/reciprocal (expressed by a single 
suffix and differentiated only by meaning). Valency increasing causatives 
and applicatives stay apart from the others as they are encoded 
exclusively by prefixes and both by prefixes and suffixes, respectively. 
Even though they have several variants, none of them overlaps with valency 
decreasing affixes. The valency decreasing affixes, on the contrary, are 
expressed just by two suffixes that spread over all valency decreasing 
operations: -ti- is one of antipassives and reflexive/reciprocal, -ki- is 
another antipassive and the only middle, the passive is encoded by 
combination of any of two causative prefixes and -ti- suffix. Surprisingly 
enough, this coincidence of form doesn't bring the author to any 
generalizations: she doesn't seem to see any problem in such a mess 
of 'homonymic' affixes (e.g. -ti- 'antipassive' and -ti- 'reflexive'), on 
the one hand, and the expression of the same concept by totally different 
affixes (antipassive -ki- and -ti-), on the other hand. Thus, to sum it up 
for the review reader, there are actually only two valency decreasing 
suffixes (-ki-, -ti-) and the latter can co-occur with causative prefixes 
to encode also a type of valency decreasing operation.

Aspectual derivations are progressive (differentiating between transitive 
and intransitive variants), inceptive (expressed by two different 
suffixes), iterative (expressed by total reduplication, suffix or infix, 
all responsible for different meaning: 'fast repetition', 'repetition over 
a long period of time' and 'neuter repetition', respectively) and durative 
(expressed by partial reduplication). In addition to them, there are a 
number of analytic constructions, particles and clitics that are used to 
express aspectual meanings. They are treated partly in this Chapter 
(habitual analytic structures with auxiliary verbs 'be, sit' and 'know' 
and habitual clitic), partly in Chapter 11 (see below).

Speaking about cross-reference system, there are intransitive and 
transitive paradigms. In the former, there is agreement only in gender 
with the subject (i.e. A/S argument, as Moseten is an accusative 
language), 1st person plural inclusive subject being an exception: it has 
a special suffix, which doesn't show gender distinctions though. In the 
latter, there is agreement in person, gender and number of both subject 
and primary object, but all verbal forms 'only refer to a subset of these 
features' (p.185), i.e. there is no verbal form displaying the agreement 
in all three categories for both participants. This transitive cross-
reference system is far from being straightforward, and no general logic 
was found by the author. Sakel simply lists possible suffixes resulting 
from all combinations of subject's and object's gender, person and number, 
leaving thus the discovery of overall strategies operating on them for 
further research.

There are special affixes for 2nd person imperative; commands to other 
persons are expressed by general cross-reference forms. Negative 
imperative doesn't have special form and is expressed by standard verbal 
negation of positive imperative. It's worth noting that reflexive verbs 
take slightly different imperative affixes which might probably turn out 
to be trivially derived by their etymology, though. At last, few verbs 
have lexical hortative forms whose etymology is opaque.

Chapter 10, "Negation", discusses negation strategies and related 
problems. Moseten has general negation marker that can be applied to the 
entire close, as well as to any of the constituents. It is also used as an 
answer to negative questions. There are also a negative existential marker 
and a negative possessive marker, even though in positive existential and 
possessive clauses no copulas are used at all (see below).

Chapter 11, "Modality and discourse markers", treats particles and clitics 
all having in common that they are a part of sentential semantics and they 
are not obligatory. Clitics are differentiated from particles on linear 
order criteria: the latter can appear everywhere in the clause, even in 
the very beginning, while the former are always attached to the right of 
their host (first element of the clause for sentential clitics). Moseten 
has two productive evidential particles ('hearsay' and 'sensory 
experience'), a number of modal particles and clitics (only two of them 
are treated as 'grammatical': irrealis and necessity, nine others encoding 
speaker's certainty), five emphasis markers, six 'referential discourse 
markers' (cf., 'only, just', 'again', 'also', etc.) and eight 
temporal/aspectual reference particles. The latter being facultative, 
Moseten temporal reference can thus always remain unspecified and the same 
clause can refer either to past, present or future.

Chapter 12, "Clause types", is concerned with different types of 
independent clauses of Moseten (verbal, non-verbal and interrogative) with 
special attention to their constituent order. The language is 'pro-drop' 
and full NPs appear only for introduction of new referents or for emphatic 
purposes. The least pragmatically marked word order is SV(O) in these 
cases. Non-verbal clauses usually don't contain any copula and the 
combined elements are just juxtaposed (the only exception are negative non-
verbal clauses, see above). Interrogative clauses have a question particle 
that follows the interrogated element, the latter being always fronted, 
i.e. in a clause-initial position. There are also a number of focus 
constructions involving special focus particles.

Chapter 13, "Clause combinations", explores clause coordination and 
subordination in Moseten. Basically, clauses are coordinated in the same 
way as NPs are: either by juxtaposition, or by a special particle. The 
contrastive coordination can be marked by one of two particles (clitics?): 
emphasizing subject non-coreference 'but', and frustrative, used to mark a 
contrast within a clause as well. Relative (restrictive, non-restrictive 
and headless), adverbial and complement clauses have the same structure as 
independent clauses. Their subordinate function is either marked only by a 
suffix ('linker morpheme', see Chapter 4), particle or clitics in case of 
relative, complement and adverbial clauses, respectively, or isn't marked 
at all in the case of same-subject complement clauses. There are two minor 
non-finite clause types: nominalizations that are only reported to encode 
complement clauses of ditransitive matrix verbs like 'forbid' and 'beg' 
and participles used almost exclusively for description of successive 
actions of the same participant. The word order in subordinate clauses is 
more or less the same as in independent clauses.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

The book provides a detailed and comprehensive description of Moseten. It 
is the result of a deep and careful investigation of the language that was 
completely unknown before this study. The grammar is really reader-
friendly: the language is extremely clear (the only small problem is the 
confusing usage of the word 'marker' instead of 'suffix', 'particle' 
or 'clitic') and all the numerous examples are carefully glossed and 
translated, for many of them the pragmatic context is provided as well. 
It's evident that the author has a thorough knowledge of Moseten that goes 
far beyond general linguist's needs. Moreover, this study represents an 
exemplary collaboration between a linguist and speech community: e.g. the 
choice of orthography for this purely scientific study was ruled not by 
methodological considerations, but resulted from the discussions in the 
community induced by the researcher.

However, the main minus of the grammar is somehow connected with its 
pluses: the author seems to prefer stating linguistic facts as they are, 
instead of trying to find a better analysis and to provide plausible 
arguments for it. Still, I think it will be quite easy for typologists and 
other general linguists to find examples relevant if not to their 
theoretical discussions, but to their topic for sure. All main linguistic 
facts are carefully documented and if one is interested in presence or 
absence of a feature in Moseten, (s)he can find the necessary information 
in the book. Unfortunately, it's not always possible to go into further 
details, though sometimes it is.

Summing up, even though the analysis presented here is not probably as 
detailed and insightful as that found in some other descriptive grammars 
of the last decade, one can't simply disregard the fact that the basics of 
the whole language family were unknown before this book. It seems to be a 
matter of metaphysical reflections whether it is better to publish that 
precious information one has for the moment or to pursue never-ending 
analysis leaving the whole subject a mystery to the others.

At last, I'd like to make some comments on the structure of the grammar. 
It possesses a very detailed table of contents, making it in principle 
easy to find necessary information. Such clarity is particularly 
important, as some facts appear not in the place you would expect it:

1. Nominalization in treated in Chapter 4 "The nominal system", not in 
Chapter 8 "The verbal system", while verbalization (that is confusingly 
referred to as 'incorporation markers'), on the contrary, is presented in 
the latter, not in the former chapter;
2. The fact that each modifier of an NP is marked by the 'linker 
morpheme', not only one of them, is mentioned in the Chapter 6 "Adjectives 
and adverbs", not in Section 4.7. "Noun phrase structures";
3. "Voice" is treated in a separate Chapter 9 and not as a part of Chapter 
8 "The verbal system", even though it's encoded by the same type of verbal 
affixes and Chapter 8 is said to treat "inflectional and derivational 
verbal structures" (p.181);
4. Reflexive/Reciplocal are described in Section 8.1. "Verbal inflection", 
not in Chapter 9 "Voice", even though they are expressed by the same type 
of affix, as other valence-changing derivations;
5. Section 8.5. "Aspect" of Chapter 8 "The verbal system" is announced to 
treat only derivations on verbs, postponing all other ways of expressing 
aspect to further chapters; but 'habitual' treated there is encoded either 
by an analytic structure, or a by a clitic of the type presented in 
Chapter 11 "Modality and discourse markers";
6. Frustrative that actually is a sentential discourse marker used not 
only in coordinated structures, is treated in Chapter 13 "Clause 
combinations", and not in Chapter 11 "Modality and discourse markers".

Moreover, the structure of the entire Chapter 8 "The verbal system" is 
quite confusing and doesn't facilitate understanding: the exposition goes 
from inflection to stem types, then to stem markers and back to 
derivational affixes. It seems to be logical to go in the reverse order: 
first to describe stem formation by stem markers from bound roots, then 
the types of stems resulting from the previous procedure, then the 
derivational affixes operated on these stems and at last inflectional 
categories.

And if the structural oddities can be generally overcome by the mentioned 
table of contents, a very strange choice of abbreviations turns out to 
cause some problems in reading the book. While in descriptive and 
typological linguistics abbreviation of almost all grammatical meanings 
are conventionalized to a great extent (cf. such an outcome of this 
convention as Leipzig Glossing Rules at 
http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/files/morpheme.html) and thus can be often 
understood without reference to the List of abbreviations, it's not true 
for this grammar. Examples include ITI = 'iterative', RE = 'reflexive', NO 
= nominalization, CS = stative causative, HA = 'habitual', etc.

It's worth noting that the quality of the editing is really high: for 504 
pages, I haven't encountered any real misprint (can 'focuSSing'(p. 91) be 
considered to be a misprint?) and only one mistake in glossing (example 
8:284 must have DK, not AN for -ki- morpheme (p.274)). The only fairly 
serious error is in the footnotes: in the text, the footnotes from 52 to 
59 appear as 19-26, in the body of the notes it's the correct 52-59.

A Grammar of Moseten is by sure a very important contribution to the field 
of South American languages and general typology. There is no doubt that 
comparative studies in the area may now go much further and that many 
linguists will find it as valuable source of data on the whole range of 
phenomena.

REFERENCES

Dixon, R. M. W. and Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2004. Adjective classes: A cross-
linguistic typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bhat, D. N. S. 1994. The adjectival category: criteria for the 
differentiation and identification. Amsterdam: Benjamins. (Studies in 
Language Companion Series, 24)

Greenberg, J. H. 1987. Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford 
University Press.

Suarez, J. A. 1969. Moseten and Pano-Tacanan. Anthropological Linguistics 
11(9), 255-266.

Swadesh, M. 1963. On aboriginal languages of Latin America (Acerca de 
languages aborigines de America Latina). Current Anthropology 4, 317-318.

Wetzer, H. 1992. "Nouny" and "verby" adjectivals: A typology of predicate 
adjectival constructions // Michel Kefer, Johan van der Auwera (eds.). 
Meaning and grammar: cross-linguistic perspectives. Berlin: Mouton de 
Gruyter, 223-262. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Olesya Khanina is a PhD student of Moscow State University, Philological 
Faculty, Department of Theoretical and Applied linguistics and a visiting 
scientist at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig), 
Department of Linguistics. She is currently working on a cross-
linguistical study of desideratives, with attention both to its semantics 
and morphosyntax. Beside the desideratives, her research interests 
includes typology of argument structure (interaction between parameters of 
argument structure and actionality). She has an extensive field-work 
experience in a number of languages of Russian Federation (Tatar, Chuvash, 
Balkar (Turkic), Nenets (Uralic)).





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