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Vol. 31, nos. 3-4
(Fall and Winter 1989)

Contents

Abstracts

"The Language of the Coast Tribes is Half Basque":
A Basque-American Indian Pidgin in Use between Europeans and Native Americans in North America, ca. 1540-ca. 1640

Peter Bakker
University of Amsterdam

Abstract. Basque fishermen were among the most numerous visitors to the eastern coast of North America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They traded actively with some of the native tribes on the coast and along the banks of the Saint Lawrence River. A trade language, a pidgin based on Basque and American Indian languages, developed and was used by both American Indians and Europeans. Historical and linguistic evidence of the Basque elements of this pidgin is presented.

Winnebago Accent: The Rest of the Data

Kenneth L. Miner
University of Kansas

Abstract. Current published accounts of Winnebago accent in metrical frameworks are based on insufficient data and so fail to characterize correctly the accent patterns of Winnebago words. Among recent work Halle and Vergnaud (1987) has been especially influential; that work follows the lead of Hale and White Eagle (1980) in recognizing an important distinction between epenthetic vowels that interrupt preassigned structure and those that do not. However, I will show in this paper that any metrical account using right-headed binary constituents will have to resort to some ad hoc device to handle the behavior of words beginning with underlying obstruent-resonant clusters.

Noun Incorporation and Metaphor:
Semantic Process in Akwesasne Mohawk

Nancy Bonvillain
State University of New York, Stony Brook

Abstract. This paper discusses semantic aspects of noun incorporation in Akwesasne Mohawk, one of six Northern Iroquoian languages spoken today. Meanings of verb stems with incorporated nouns are shown to range from literal referents of transitive action to abstract, nontangible metaphors. NI is examined as the structural means through which novel semantic units are formed. These new units expand the interpretative range of basic meanings as part of creative linguistic and conceptual processes. Metaphors are created to fulfill lexical and poetic functions. Data are presented and analyzed from body part and other semantic domains.

Transposing Symbolic Forms:
Actor Awareness of Language Structures in Navajo Ritual

D. W. Murray
Brandeis University

Abstract. This article examines Navajo speech forms used during ritual occasions, from ceremonial healing enactments to hunting and raiding events. Various linguistic components, from narrative structure to obligatory grammatical categories, are systematically altered in certain forms of these activities. This repatterning of linguistic form is taken as evidence of native conscious awareness of language and performative efficacy. That is, a native theory of meaning, form, and social action relationships, termed metapragmatic awareness, is revealed in these ritual alterations.

Maya Bloodletting and the Number Three

Brian Stross
University of Texas

Abstract. This essay proposes, first, to demonstrate an association between the number three and bloodletting iconography of the Mayas and of their Olmec predecessors, and, second, to suggest an explanation for that association, which is reflected in a sonic resemblance between Mixe-Zoquean words for 'three' and Mayan words for 'flint, bloodletter, to let blood'. The connection between bloodletting concepts and the number three is ultimately derived from a near homophony between Mixe-Zoquean words for 'three' and Mixe-Zoquean words for concepts such as cut, which allow both for rebus writing and for rebuslike iconographic representation of bloodletting concepts through a depiction of forms representing or implying three. Simply put, the Classic Mayas apparently inherited a symbolic association between three and bloodletting that goes back to the Olmecs and that might have originated in Olmec language homophony.

Jawoyn Relationship Terms:
Interactional Dimensions of Australian Kin Classification

Francesca Merlan
Sydney University

Abstract. In Australian Aboriginal societies, everyone is classified within the idiom of kinship. In some languages, in addition to ordinary relationship terms that implicate a referent and propositus, there are additional relationship terms that simultaneously encode relations of more than one person to the referent. The way in which the participant roles of the speech situation (speaker, addressee) intersect with the structure of kin relations encoded by such terms is described for Jawoyn, a language of the Northern Territory.

Linguistic Change and the Bedouin-Sedentary
Dichotomy in Old Arabic Dialects

Frederic J. Cadora
Ohio State University

Abstract. This study examines some aspects of diversification in the linguistic structure of old bedouin and sedentary dialects (seventh to eighth century A.D.); attributes this linguistic variation to a gradual change in the rate and extent of application of certain variable rules in the two ecological environments; and demonstrates the early development of an innovative bedouin and conservative sedentary linguistic dichotomy.

Last updated: 12 March 1996
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