17.800, Review: Lang Description/Amerindian Langs: Quesada (2000)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-17-800. Wed Mar 15 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.800, Review: Lang Description/Amerindian Langs: Quesada (2000)

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1)
Date: 13-Mar-2006
From: Yury Lander < yulander at yandex.ru >
Subject: A Grammar of Teribe 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 22:59:11
From: Yury Lander < yulander at yandex.ru >
Subject: A Grammar of Teribe 
 

AUTHOR: Quesada, J. Diego
TITLE: A Grammar of Teribe
SERIES: Lincom Studies in Native American Linguistics 36
PUBLISHER: Lincom GmbH
YEAR: 2000
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-1824.html 

Yury A. Lander, Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow

This monograph presents a full-length grammatical description of 
Teribe, a Chibchan idiom spoken in Northwestern Panama. Teribe is a 
dialect of a language occasionally called Naso, which constitutes a 
separate branch of the Chibcha family. Not so long ago Naso included 
also another dialect known as Terraba. The latter was used until 
recently by descendants of a group ''relocated'' to the present Costa-
Rica. Now, however, the Terraba dialect seems to have disappeared, 
while Teribe is still actively employed. Thus, this grammar documents 
an idiom that still has about 1,000 speakers (according to the 
monograph) and is felt to be an important property of the Teribe 
people contrasting it with other cultures (as follows, for instance, from 
the fact that the author of the volume had to get a permit from the King 
of Teribe in order to study the language). That is why Quesada, the 
author of the grammar, was able to fulfill an investigation of a number 
of moot issues and provide a rather deep study.

It is worth noting that despite the fact that the Terraba dialect is now 
dead, it got more descriptions than Teribe. In reality, until the late 
1990s, Teribe was honored just a few papers written by SIL scholars 
and describing single aspects of the dialect (sometimes inaccurately, 
according to the present grammar). Subsequent works include a 
detailed description of Teribe phonology by Oakes (2001), but first of 
all a number of studies undertaken by Quesada. The monograph 
reviewed here, however, is only partly based on those studies (and in 
fact, occasionally presents corrections to the author's former views). 
Anyway, this is the first grammar of Teribe and - as we will see shortly - 
perhaps the first grammar published in English that considers a 
Chibchan language so elaborately.

OVERVIEW

The body of the book consists of an introductory part and three 
chapters devoted to phonology, morphology and syntax. The 
exposition is supplied with sample texts and bibliography. The 
chapters of the book are further divided into sections, of which some 
constitute rather large and autonomous pieces. Below such sections 
will be treated separately.

Chapter 1 gives general information on the Teribe people and the 
genetic, areal and sociolinguistic context of their language. This 
chapter also includes a brief section on previous studies of Teribe and 
Terraba and an overview of the basic typological characteristics of 
Teribe.

Chapter 2 is devoted to the Teribe phonology. After presenting the list 
of phonemes, Quesada discusses most phonological oppositions 
illustrating them with minimal pairs. Then the author provides 
information on various phonological processes, suprasegmental 
phenomena (such as tone and stress) and introduces orthographical 
conventions accepted in the monograph. Remarkably, this chapter 
demonstrates that phonological means do not all play the same role in 
Teribe, since some contrasts that are arguably more complex than 
others (e.g., the aspiration contrast, which exists here for voiceless 
stops only, and tone oppositions) occupy a rather peripheral place in 
the Teribe system being in most cases neutralized.

Although Chapter 3 is entitled ''Morphology'', for the most part it does 
not deal with morphology per se (that is, with parts of words), since 
many grammatical notions are expressed in Teribe analytically. As a 
result, this chapter presents mainly the description of word classes 
and grammatical markers co-occurring with them.

Section 3.1 is concerned with nominals (i.e. nouns and various types 
of pronouns) and their satellites, basically those that are related to the 
expression of quantity - plural markers, a partitive particle etc. A 
typologically important feature of Teribe is the existence of numeral 
classifiers. They are too discussed in this section, although as we will 
see later, the attribution of numeral classifiers to nominal satellites is 
not without problems. Finally, already this section shows the author's 
interest in the interaction of the information structure and grammar, 
since it concludes with a detailed discussion of topic and focus 
markers.

Section 3.2 describes verbs, the word class that in fact displays the 
bulk of 'real morphology' in Teribe. Somewhat surprisingly, Quesada 
includes here a very brief description of non-verbal, 'asyndetic' 
predications, which are said to ''roughly correspond to copular 
sentences in other languages'' (p. 64). This becomes more 
understandable when one finds that the verb word class in Teribe is 
rather heterogeneous grammatically. In particular, Quesada shows 
(though not explicates) that putative verbs may differ in how many 
prototypical verbal features they display, with some lexemes being in a 
sense ''less verbal'' than others. Thus, for instance, for positional 
verbs the author states that ''there is no morphological evidence for 
the verbhood of these forms'' (p. 66), for movement verbs he argues 
that their behavior in certain aspects ''can be summarized as halfway 
between positional and intransitive verbs'' (p. 69), etc. Non-verbal 
predicates apparently constitute one of the extreme poles of this 
scale, thus their presentation in this section contributes to its complete 
picture.

Next, this section turns to verb categories, among which Quesada 
marks out aspect, person/number, position, and modality. To be sure, 
most of them are formally optional and/or require specific 
constructions (consequently, Quesada has to describe not only their 
functions but also the relevant contexts). A remarkable exception is 
aspect, which therefore lies in the heart of (some part of) the verb 
class and should be of definite interest for students of verb categories. 
Thus already the fact that there exists some aspectual variation which 
depends on syntax and information structure gives cause for 
reflection. Unfortunately, the monograph presents only the first 
approximation to this fragment of grammar, since it only makes formal 
statements and briefly discusses relevant meanings (although note 
that this topic is touched upon also in another chapter where inverse 
constructions are described).

Adjectives, which make the topic of Section 3.3, are perhaps the least 
interesting of content word classes in Teribe. They are claimed not 
to ''inflect'' like nouns or verbs (p. 85, but recall that the nature 
of ''inflection'' in Teribe is different from that in, say, European 
languages). Hence most of this section deals with adjective formation, 
the more so as non-derived adjectives in Teribe constitute only a small 
class (carefully described here), while most adjectives are derived by 
suffixation, or reduplication, or compounding.

The last section of the chapter deals with minor word classes, which 
include adverbs, postpositions, conjunctions, markers of question and 
negation, and particles. This section naturally involves a good deal of 
syntactic information (so that, for instance, adverbs are treated here 
together with complex adverbial phrases), hence it may serve as a 
bridge to the next chapter.

Chapter 4 provides a syntactic characterization of Teribe, which 
proves to require investigations into quite a few complex issues, such 
as the extremely puzzling encoding of grammatical relations, the 
interaction between a participant's topicality and its expression within 
the clause etc.

Section 4.1 of this chapter is said to be devoted to simple sentence. 
Nonetheless, here one can also find data on the structure of noun 
phrases, comparatives, possession as well as on certain virtually 
complex constructions (verb serialization and the relative 
construction). One topic shared by many parts of this section 
concerns identification of grammatical relations in Teribe and the 
related problem of the nature of inverse constructions. In addition, this 
section contains information on several ''valence and syntactic 
operations'' - causative constructions, external possession and dative 
shift, reflexives etc.

Section 4.2 focuses on complex sentences, among which the author 
contrasts between coordinate and subordinate (paratactic and 
hypotactic in Quesada's terms) constructions. In fact, this topic is not 
elaborated deeply in the grammar, so in most cases the author 
restricts himself to presenting general descriptive information on 
grammatical means involved in clausal combinations.

Finally, Section 4.3 deals with the reflections of the information 
structure in the organization of Teribe sentence. Note that this issue is 
touched upon in various parts of the grammar, yet this section 
provides a useful summary and discussion of the relevant facts 
presented in other sections.

Chapter 5 is in a sense an appendix to the grammar, since it contains 
five texts of different genres and length. All texts have morpheme-by-
morpheme glosses together with a free English translation.

The monograph concludes with a bibliography.

DISCUSSION


Any language is interesting but it is a merit of a description that a 
language appears as interesting. Teribe as it is represented in this 
grammar looks indeed intriguing in some respects and indicative in 
others. This is achieved apparently by the author's scrupulousness 
and occasional keenness on concrete issues.

Typologically, perhaps the most notable feature of Teribe is the way it 
distinguishes between grammatical relations. It is not surprising 
therefore that this aspect of the Teribe grammar is mentioned in 
several parts of the monograph and honored with several 
subsections. In general, Teribe employs three means for 
distinguishing between core grammatical relations, namely (i) word 
order, (ii) morphological forms of pronouns (nominative vs. oblique), 
and (iii) ''agreement'', whereby verbs are suffixed with person 
morphemes (which originated from oblique pronouns) and normally 
are not accompanied by any corresponding lexical noun phrase. The 
last two means are used almost exclusively with pronominal 
participants, moreover, 3rd person nominative pronouns are null 
(except for the ''different subject'' plural pronoun), so it is word order 
that plays the major role in that part of the grammar. Quesada finds 
the following possible transitive constructions, certain non-indicative 
constructions left aside (here O refers to Undergoer, A to Actor, S to 
intransitive subject, -a and -s to personal suffixes referring to Actor 
and intransitive subject respectively, V to verb, while Nom and Obl 
stand for nominative and oblique forms of pronouns):
1. O(Nom) V-a, or (very infrequently) O(Obl) V-a
2. A(Nom) O(Obl) V
In addition, there is an inverse construction:
3. O(Nom) V A(Nom), or O(Obl) V A(Nom), where the verb receives 
special aspectual marking and the Actor is usually (but not always) 
followed by the obviative marker.
The intransitive clause looks simply as:
4. S(Nom) V, or (very infrequently) V-s

The system is straightforward, since it easily allows contrasting 
between Actors and Undergoers. Yet it turns out to be difficult to 
provide it with any appropriate typological characterization. Quesada 
spends much of his text in choosing between an ergative analysis and 
an accusative analysis. He argues in favor of the latter, but using a 
negative criterion: ''the members of the oblique paradigm cannot be 
used to code A nor S, only O'' (p. 109). This decision is not fully 
convincing, however. First, it is not at all apparent that negative 
criteria can be used for assigning a language accusative or ergative 
status (although they certainly can be counted as a matter of support 
of some analysis). Second, while following his argumentation, 
Quesada has to recruit the construction with agreement and oblique 
Undergoer, which he himself seemingly considers marginal. Third, the 
author apparently ignores the oblique origin of personal suffixes. 
Curiously, later Quesada attempts to show that ''the use of pronoun 
paradigms in Teribe has been subject to discourse grammar rather 
than to strictly sentence grammar'' (p. 118), so presumably the choice 
between the nominative and oblique form should not be involved in 
the syntactic characterization of the language.

Note that the view that the first two constructions only (without 
the ''marginal'' variant of the ''agreement'' pattern) constitute looks very 
similar to ''symmetrical voice'' systems, where transitive sentences 
have two (or more) structurally parallel variants, which only differ in 
whether the subject is Actor or Undergoer (see Foley 1998 among 
many others). With all this going on, neither Actor nor Undergoer are 
demoted to become obliques (as is the case in passive constructions 
in accusative languages and antipassive in ergative ones). All this 
applies to Teribe. In neither of the Teribe basic transitive constructions 
are there traces of elimination of Actor or Undergoer from the core of 
the clause. Furthermore, given that personal suffixes serve here as 
oblique pronouns, the two patterns form a symmetrical opposition:
<pre>
         Actor           Undergoer
O V-a    Obl             Nom
A O V    Nom             Obl
</pre>
Thus, Teribe at first glance seems to show a ''symmetrical voice'' 
system, and its main distinction from other similar languages (e.g., 
most Austronesian languages of Philippines and Taiwan) is that 
different alignments are reflected here not by voice morphology but by 
word order. For such systems, however, it does not make sense to 
speak whether they are ergative or accusative, since they are neither 
one.

The situation becomes more complicated when we take into account 
the inverse construction. However, this construction is an innovation, 
which still shows a number of irregularities and typological 
peculiarities. Quesada argues convincingly for the inverse analysis of 
this pattern, the appearance of which is motivated usually by the non-
canonical alignment of two of the so-called topicality hierarchies, 
namely ACTOR > UNDERGOER and SPEECH ACT PARTICIPANT > 
PROXIMATE > OBVIATIVE.  But many of the properties of the inverse 
construction are still unusual. Thus, for instance, the obviative Actor is 
nonetheless often marked with a topic particle, despite the fact that 
cross-linguistically inverse constructions prefer non-topic subjects. 
Further, case alignment in the inverse construction does not seem to 
be well-established (in fact, Undergoer - if pronominal - is expressed 
here either by Nominative form or by Oblique form, judging from 
examples given, depending on person). Recall now that 
the ''agreement'' pattern is restricted to pronominal Actors, so the 
inverse pattern complements it in that it allows non-pronominal actors 
to appear in a similar construction. Support for this comes from (1), 
where the ''agreement construction'' and the inverse construction 
merge. (This example is given in the section devoted to aspect and 
represents a pattern not mentioned by Quesada.)
<pre>
(1)
wua-kz-a  äya   li  dë  ga   shotwa-kz-a
eat-SUD-3 devil TOP OBV CONN vomit-SUD-3
The devil ate [him] and vomited [him] at once. (p. 74)
</pre>
(CONN - linker, OBV - obviative, SUD - sudden aspect, TOP - topic 
particle, 3 - 3rd person Actor)

We thus get a clear picture of the distribution of constructions which is 
based neither on ergative nor on accusative scheme. There does 
seem to be a grain of truth, however, in Quesada's claim (p. 119) that 
there is ''a transition currently in progress in the language''. This 
follows from the occasional appearance of oblique Undergoers in 
the ''agreement construction'' and the inverse construction (note that 
here the two patterns again go together) as well as from the fact that 
personal suffixes now turn from bound argumental expressions into 
real agreement markers as this is evidenced by the occasional use of 
these suffixes in intransitive sentences (p. 84) and their appearance 
together with free actor noun phrases (1). Clearly, the direction of this 
reanalysis is towards the accusative type. This too resembles many 
Austronesian languages, which originally had ''symmetrical voice'' 
systems but later obtained features of the accusative type (although 
perhaps this reflects an even stronger typological tendency; cf. 
Maslova & Nikitina 2004).

While the Teribe system of identification of grammatical relations may 
look peculiar, some other features of the language are more typical - 
for the Chibchan family or typologically. Thus, for instance, the 
particular role of posture (positional) and motion (movement) verbs is 
observed in some other Chibchan languages, such as Cuna (Adelaar 
& Muysken 2004: 64-65). But Quesada's presentation actually 
highlights correlations between their grammatical properties and their 
place within the grammar. As has been said already, Teribe posture 
and motion verbs turn out to be among ''less verbal verbs'', and this is 
possibly somehow related to the fact that typologically these verbs are 
very inclined to grammaticalization (cf. Maisak 2005). In Teribe (as 
seemingly in Cuna) posture verbs often appear with their more 
prototypical confreres constituting what Quesada calls ''a verbal 
category of POSITION''. In addition, both posture and motion verbs are 
easily involved into serial chains (this allows the latter occasionally not 
to be marked for aspect, arguably the main verbal category in Teribe), 
which constitutes one of the canonical contexts of grammaticalization. 
That grammaticalization sources should be non-typical (in respect to 
other members of their category) seems to be an interesting 
implication, after all.   

Another feature of Teribe that is representative of Chibchan 
languages is the existence of numeral classifiers. What is interesting 
about Teribe classifiers, however, is that they tend to ''float'' breaking 
away from the object counted:
<pre>
(2)
Shwong ko    plublun i-no-r       k-ara
dress  color white   see-PERF-1SG CL-one
I saw one white dress. (p. 49)
</pre>
(CL - classifier, PERF - perfective, 1SG - 1st singular Actor) 

In fact, examples of adnominal classifier-numeral complexes provided 
in the grammar either are given without context or are included into 
possessor noun phrases (which blocks their float). It has been argued 
elsewhere (Bach et al., eds, 1995) that A(dverbial)-quantification has 
bigger potential than D(eterminer)-quantification, so Teribe probably 
helps substantiate this claim. 

There are other interesting facts that can be found in the monograph. 
Thus, for instance, Teribe displays very fuzzy borderlines between 
coordination and subordination (employing for most kinds of clause 
linking a single connector), instances of rather interesting 
polyfunctionality, sometimes typologically natural (as with the use of a 
single particle of adverbial origin for topics and relatives) but 
occasionally surprising (cf. the use of a demonstrative for marking 
CLAUSE boundaries), and even indefinite readings of personal 
pronouns (p. 97) etc. It is a pity that many of these facts are described 
in sections that are not devoted primarily to the phenomena in 
question. But it is, of course, a merit of the author that he managed to 
provide a detailed portrait of the language despite all these 
''obstacles''. To Quesada's credit is also the fact that so much of 
the book is concerned with information structure, which is not usual for 
grammars.

As for the analyses proposed in this grammar, although they are not 
always fully convincing, it is important that for the most part Quesada 
provides enough data for readers to be able to make decisions 
themselves. This is not to say that this grammar is comprehensive - 
yet it is still detailed enough and may obtain wide employment for 
linguists and hopefully for the Teribe people - at least because the 
Teribes can be proud of this grammar, as can its author.

REFERENCES

Adelaar, Willem F. H., with Pieter C. Muysken. 2004. The Languages 
of the Andes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bach, Emmon, Eloise Jelinek, Angelika Kratzer, and Barbara H. Partee 
(eds). 1995. Quantification in Natural Languages. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Foley, William A. 1998. Symmetrical voice systems and 
precategoriality in Philippine languages. Paper presented at the 
Workshop on Voice and Grammatical Functions in Austronesian 
Languages, LFG98 Conference, Brisbane, July 1998.
[http://www.sultry.arts.usyd.edu.au/LFG98/austro/foley/fintro.htm] 

Maisak, Timur A. 2005. Tipologija grammatikalizacii konstrukcij s 
glagolami dvizhenija i glagolami pozicii. [Grammaticalization paths of 
motion and posture verbs: a typology.] Moscow: Jazuki skavjanskix 
kul'tur.

Maslova, Elena and Tatiana Nikitina. 2004. Case marking patterns in 
diachronic perspective. Paper presented at the conference ''Syntax of 
the World's Languages 1,'' Leipzig, August 2004. 
[http://email.eva.mpg.de/~cschmidt/SWL1/handouts/Maslova1.pdf]

Oakes, Perry J. 2001. A description of Teribe phonology. SIL 
Electronic Working Papers 2001-003. 
[http://www.sil.org/silewp/2001/003/] 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Yury Lander is a research fellow in the Institute of Oriental Studies, 
Moscow. He specializes in Austronesian and Caucasian languages 
and in the morphosyntactic typology of noun phrases and clauses. His 
current interests include the issues of polysynthesis and typological 
databases.





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