26.1549, Featured Linguist: Lisa Matthewson

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-1549. Mon Mar 23 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.1549, Featured Linguist: Lisa Matthewson

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Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2015 15:45:06
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Lisa Matthewson

 Dear Subscribers,

We are pleased to present you our featured linguist Lisa Matthewson for Fund Drive 2015. Please support the LINGUIST List editors and activities with a donation:

http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/

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Lisa Matthewson

Tēnā koutou katoa – K’alhwá7al’ap – Simgigyat, sigidim haanaḵ’, ͟ganhl k’uba wilxsihlxw – Greetings to all of you! The first of these greetings is in Māori, reflecting my New Zealand heritage. It literally means something like ‘You all plural.’ The second is in St’át’imcets, the Salish language I have been working on since 1992, and literally says something like ‘You plural are apparently there.’ The third is in Gitksan, the Tsimshianic language I have been working on since 2010. However, Gitksan doesn’t really do greetings. To a friend, informally, one could just say ‘Nit! – literally the third person independent series 3 pronoun. But the words above are a traditional way to begin a speech, and translate as ‘Male chiefs, female chiefs, princes and princesses.’

Rather than telling my story in chronological order, I’d like to start with what happened to me just last Friday. I am currently researching discourse particles in Gitksan, and I was trying to test my hypothesis that the particle ist is used whenever the speaker is fully answering the current Question Under Discussion. In order to test this – following up on a suggestion by Norvin Richards – I was asking my consultant whether Gitksan versions of discourses like the following sound good, with ist in the second utterance:

A: I don’t want to know whether Bob came to the feast.
B: He came.

Read more: 
http://blog.linguistlist.org/?p=2084

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-1549	
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