Syncretisms involving clusivity
The inclusive and exclusive are commonly considered to be kinds of the first person plural. In this chapter, I will investigate whether they deserve this name by looking at syncretisms between clusivity and other person markers. Such syncretisms are rare, but a thorough investigation has resulted in a large enough sample to allow for some conclusions. The result is that the exclusive is often syncretic with the first person singular, and can thus indeed be considered a kind of first person plural. In contrast, the inclusive cannot. Further, the often claimed link between inclusive and second person in spurious. This claim probably only arose because of selected attention for those syncretisms arguing for such a connection, but disregarding all other syncretisms that argue against it. In this survey, all possible syncretisms are considered resulting in the observation that the inclusive/second person syncretism does not occur more often than others.
The penumbra of morphosyntactic feature systems 1
Features are often presented as clean, neat and simple. This is understandable, since it is the contrast with the widely varying behaviour of lexical entries which gives the intuitive justification for features. But real feature systems are more complex. For instance, linguists do not agree on how many case values Russian has, after years of study and argument. Yet Russian is no recent discovery, no obscurity pieced together from scraps of evidence. At least it is clear that Russian has a case feature. A whole feature may be in question: for the Daghestanian language Archi the issue is whether it has person at all. More generally, there are many examples where we need to ask whether we really have a proper feature, or feature value. We have to recognize that feature systems vary according to how well founded they are, and here the work of the Set-theoretical School is still of value. They also vary in how features and their values are distributed across the lexicon, sometimes in principled ways, sometimes almost randomly.
Nez Perce and Northern Sahaptin: A Binary Comparison
1. The main purpose of this paper is to examine the phonological and lexical correspondences for Northern Sahaptin and Nez Perce. In 1891, Powell named Chopunnish (Nez Perce), Klikitat, Paloos, Tenaino, Tyigh, Umatilla, and Walla Walla, as the principal tribes of the Shahaptian family.1 In 1931, Melville Jacobs suggested that Powell's Shahaptian, together with Lutuamian and Waiilatpuan, be tentatively designated a stock, called Sahaptin, and that Shahaptian be divided in linguistic terminology as follows: 1. northern Sahaptin, including the northwest Sahaptin, Warmsprings, waluila-palu's, and Umatilla; 2. the Nez Perce groups.2 Further, Jacobs noted that Northern Sahaptin and Nez Perce are not mutually intelligible.3 Since then, H. V. Velten in 1943 noted some possible Sahaptin cognates in his analysis of the Nez Perce verb affixes,4 Morris Swadesh stated provisional consonant correspondences including Nez Perce and Northern Sahaptin in 1956,5 and in 1957 D. H. Hymes referred to continuative elements in Northern Sahaptin and Nez Perce.6 We do not yet have a statement