Linguistics Colloquium: Dr. Joyce McDonough

The units in a polysynthetic word: a paradigm-driven approach to Dene verb structure
Dr. Joyce McDonough, University of Rochester

Polysynthetic languages pose acute problems to theories of word formation and phonology / syntax interfaces because of the sheer amount of information encoded inside the verb complex, combined with the difficulty of encoding paradigmatic variation into models which use analytic units as primes. Many researchers working on polysynthetic languages have pointed out the compromised nature of terms like ‘morpheme’, which is atheoretically understood to be a ‘sound-meaning unit’ but has no formal definition in the grammar.  In this talk, a ground-up approach to the internal structure of the Dene verb will be taken. Evidence from instrumental phonetics, phonological, phonotactic patterns and behavorial studies will be used to delineate elements in the speech stream that are likely to emerge as units of word formation in the verbal complex. A very different view of the verb structure emerges that eschews the classic template approach and aligns itself with  studies on the role of paradigms and conjugations in word formation processes.