A Grammar of Onondaga. Michael Barrie. Sogang University. Onondaga is a member of the Northern branch of the Iroquoian family. It is spoken in Ontario, Canada and New York State in the United States. It is a highly endangered language with only a small handful of speakers, mostly over 60. Like other Iroquoian languages, Onondaga has a small phonemic inventory, but a rich inflectional and derivational morphology. It is a polysynthetic language with noun incorporation, subject and object agreement, and numerous morphological resources expressing both compositional and non-compositional meanings. Word order is rather free, but certain regularities are noted. The grammar aims to be theoretically neutral and draws data as much as possible from naturalistic data as possible. As Northern Iroquoian languages are closely related, comparisons to other Northern Iroquoian languages are made periodically. This grammar is the result of 8 years of fieldwork at Six Nations in Ontario, Canada. ISBN 9783862886005. Languages of the World/Materials 503. 102pp. 2015.

A Grammar of Onondaga

Barrie, Michael

LINCOM GmbH

This innovative analysis of noun incorporation and related linguistic phenomena does more than just give readers an insightful exploration of its subject. The author re-evaluates―and forges links between―two influential theories of phrase structure: Chomsky’s Bare Phrase Structure and Richard Kayne’s Antisymmetry. The text details how the two linguistic paradigms interact to cause differing patterns of noun incorporation across world languages. With a solid empirical foundation in its close reading of Northern Iroquoian languages especially, Barrie argues that noun incorporation needs no special mechanism, but results from a symmetry-breaking operation. Drawing additional data from English, German, Persian, Tamil and the Polynesian language Niuean, this synthesis has major implications for our understanding of the formation of the verbal complex and the intra-position (roll-up) movement. It will be priority reading for students of phrase structure, as well as Iroquoian language scholars.

Dynamic Antisymmetry and the Syntax of Noun Incorporation (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 84)

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

Springer

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Books by Barrie, Michael

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Barrie, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Grammar of Onondaga

Dynamic Antisymmetry and the Syntax of Noun Incorporation (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 84)