Nahuatl word classes

Wed Nov 7 00:27:58 UTC 2012

Dear John and listeros

I'm responding to the inquiry about Nahuatl word classes, I am a little
worried that your approach to grammatical analysis is not the most useful
for the project you are undertaking. I think the best thing you can do is
to base those analytical choices on research done by the many excellent
linguists who have worked on Nahuatl. Personally, I think you should adopt
either Andrews or Launey's analysis - and I recommend Launey's because it
is more compatible with standard linguistic terminology. If you don't want
to do this I think you would need to go back a few steps to make some tough
decisions about how to approach grammar at a theoretical level. And here
for the sake of the utility of the database you want to build I think the
best choice would be to assure that it is compatible with what is by now
called "basic linguistic theory" which is used for all kinds of linguistic
typology and almost all langauge documentation. A good example of this
theoretical perspective is Thomas Payne's "describing Morphosyntax" which
gives the basics of how to do a typologically based language description
that can be used for cross-linguistic comparison. Subsequently some more
typologically oriented literature such as the series of mongraphs  by Dixon
and Aikhenvald might be a useful read.

What makes me say this is that in your question you are unclear on several
key grammatical distinctions which I think stems from a lack of a decision
about what grammar is and how you want to describe it, this leads you to
mix up formal (syntactic) and functional (grammatical and semantic)
criteria of "wordness". For example you conflate the notions of "word",
"root", "part of speech/word class", "morpheme", "semantic function" and
"grammatical function". The way you use the concepts are not in synch with
how they are used in descriptive linguistics, you can of course choose to
adopt a new theoretical framework, but that would seem to require a good
reason.

In linguistics a word class, also called "part of speech" is traditionally
syntactically defined. A group of words form a word class if they can be
seen to have complementary distribution to other such classes and to be
characterized by a shared underlying syntactic/grammatical function (e.g.
that of forming predicates or arguments). In language's such as Nahuatl
that have a very loose word orde and a complex morphology,  the main
criteria for describing a word as belonging to one class or the other tends
to be morphological. Verbs is any word that can take verbal morphology, and
a noun is any root that can take nominal morphology. The criteria are not
fully waterproof since certain morphologicaol categories are shared (e.g.
the subject marking morphemes), but nonetheless with careful analysis it is
almost always possible to discern differences. (e.g. verbs never take
possessive morphemes and nouns never take object morphemes (except in Oapan
Nahuatl where kinship nouns do!) or tense/aspect/mood related morphology).

Now for adjectives and adverbs this is much more complicated, because there
are no completely clear definitions of these categories, accepted by all
linguists. I think that consensus in linguistics currently is that not all
languages have adverbs and adjectives, and that only those languages have
these word classes where these categories have specific morphological or
syntactic patterns of distribution. In Nahuatl there is a small class of
words that can be considered adjectives or adverbs, but it is a small and
ambiguous class of words that are neither fully nouns nor fully verbs but
which can form predicates (I consider them to be "statives" and some of
them may be considered adjectives (e.g. hueyi, istac, yancuic, cualli) or
adverbs (e.g. yolic, huilihui). because this class of words is small and
closed instead the aspects of meaning that are carried out by adjectives
and adverbs in English, in Nahuatl  are carried out by either nouns, verbs.
But none of these classes correspond directly to what we would call
adjectives or adverbs in English, since both nouns and verbs can carry out
the functions carried out by adverbs and adjectives in English. In a
conventional analysis this does not mean that these words become adjectives
or adverbs, it just means that in this language those semantic functions
are also fulfilled by other wordclasses.

The confusion of these categories is evident for example in your examples
of *cuauhtli*. I.e. /kwaw/ is a morpheme, not a word - it doesn't belong to
any wordclass even though it clearly is nominal in its semantics and is
clearly most often used to create nouns. When constructed with the
absolutive, c*uauhtli *is a noun because it can function as an argument of
a predicate, and stand as a free word in argument position in the sentence,
and because it takes the absolutive ending, and because it can be possessed
and pluralized. In *cuauhpillli *it is still a noun root, it has just been
incorporated into another noun - which is what Nahuatl does most of the
time when it wants to modify nouns. That does not make it an adjective
though, because "adjective" is usually defined as a syntactic category with
the main function of modifying nouns (in Nahuatl the only ones are kwalli,
weyi and perhaps a few others).  I.e. /kwaw/ is a noun without regards to
the semantic function it carries out in a given context, because in all the
cases it functions exactly as all other nouns, and in opposition to either
verbs, particles and adjectives. In the same way teopixcatequitl is also a
noun that is made by combining two nouns one of which modifies the other -
teopixquetl/teopixqui does not become an adjective because it is used in
this way.

It is simply not the case that in Nahuatl there is a category of words that
can randomly function as nouns, adjectives or adverbs - this idea goes
against everything we know about Nahuatl grammar. The fact is that Nahuatl
has a class of nouns and that that class of nouns can be combined in ways
that convey the meanings of English adjectives and adverbs - but which are
still nouns syntactically and grammatically. You may wish to to take a look
at my short article on the question of Nahuatl Adjectives in Kansas Working
Papers in linguistics ) to see a little bit about how complicated it is to
define wordclasses other than "verb", "noun" and "particle" in Nahuatl
grammar (even your proposed "relational word"  I wouldn't consider a valid
word class since they are all either nouns, affixes (i.e. morphemes not
words) or particles - most of them are nouns marked for relationality with
wifferent  combinations of possession and suffixes). I end the article with
my analysis of wordclasses in Nahuatl, which is basically the same as
Launey''s and Andrews'.
http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/bitstream/1808/8101/1/KWPL-32-PharaoHansen2.pdf
It
is not a great piece of work, but it is an exercise inthe kind of
grammatical reasoning that must go before making any decision about
analyzing word classes in Nahuatl.

I think that the thing to do is to take the time to do a thorough survey
comparing analyses in the major grammatical works and seeing how they
divide up word classes and analyze their functions. This is a huge task
that will take many hundred hours of study and a really good familiarity
with linguistic theory, and how linguists make analytical choices based on
different theoretical perspectives and on analysis of evidence. I don't
think it is enough to be very good at Nahuatl, this tasks requires intimate
familiarity with linguistic theory and Nahuatl scholarship.

For this reason I don't see why anyone would undertake this endeavor from
scratch since so many eminent grammarians of Nahuatl have already done it
for us, e.g.  Carochi, Launey, Andrews, Canger, Lockhart, Lastra or Dakin.
I don't understand why you'd want to reinvent the wheel on this, and if you
go with an analysis that is too idiosyncratic you risk that the entire
documentation project will be of little use to others in the discipline,
especially if the the data format is not based on a full systemic analysis
of the language but rather on scattered observations and gut feelings.

best regards,
-- 
Magnus Pharao Hansen
PhD. student
Department of Anthropology

Brown University
128 Hope St.
Providence, RI 02906

*magnus_pharao_hansen at brown.edu*
US: 001 401 651 8413
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