A Quantitative Account of Nêhiyawêwin Order: Using mixed-effects modelling to uncover syntactic, semantic, and morphological motivations in Nêhiyawêwin

• Author / Creator

  Harrigan, Atticus

• This dissertation investigates the underpinnings of the phenomenon of Order in Nêhiyawêwin (Plains Cree) using quantitative methods and the Ahenakew-Wolfart Corpus (Arppe, Schmirler, Harrigan, & Wolvengrey, 2020). Instantiated as person-marking allomorphy on the verb, Order is central to verb morphology in Algonquian languages. According to Bloomfield (1946, 97), Algonquian languages have mutually exclusive paradigms within each verb class that serve a number of purposes including marking various moods. Orders do not cleanly map one-to-one onto other grammatical functions, but the system can be thought of as a set of morphological templates. Unlike Semitic languages, where morphological templates are attributes of a verb (i.e., each word has one template), Order is a set of templates wherein each verb can alternate. This dissertation approaches Order in Nêhiyawêwin as an alternation between multiple forms that are motivated by morphosemantic features. Importantly, this dissertation explicitly defines Order as those forms traditionally referred to as Independent and Conjunct; that is, it does not consider the Imperative to be an instantiation of Order. This allows for an analysis of three main types of alternation at varying levels of granularity, which is done through quantitative methodologies. The primary method used for analysis is that of logistic regression, as in Bresnan, Cueni, Nikitina, and Baayen (2007), Arppe (2008), and Divjak (2010). Specifically, mixed-effects logistics regression is used, allowing for modelling that takes into account the effects of sampling via random effects alongside fixed-effects. The results of this analysis indicate that contrary to expectations and the results of previous research in other languages such as Arppe (2008); Abdulrahim (2013); and Divjak and Arppe (2013), morphosyntactic and semantic features explained a relatively small amount of variance in each alternation. Instead, it appears that higher level linguistic information, such as discourse planning and reference are more important factors. These results comport with those of Cook (2014). In addition to the study of alternation, this dissertation also presents a set of exemplars that drawn from a corpus and are predicted to be the most likely (or prototypical) forms of each outcome in each alternation (cf. Divjak and Arppe (2013) who used a similar methodology). These example sentences are given in hopes that language learners and educators may use them to identify characteristics of prototypical forms of Order.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Plains Cree
  • Logistic Regression
  • Nêhiyawêwin
  • Linguistics

• Graduation date

  Spring 2024

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-31bs-5w55

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.