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Vol. 41, no. 2 (Summer 1999)

Contents

Abstracts

Textuality and the "Voices" of Informants: The Case of Edward Sapir's 1929 Navajo Field School

David W. Dinwoodie
University of New Mexico

Abstract. This article uses current approaches to "voice" to explore the local meanings of ethnographic testimonial. By considering the performance of Barnie Bitsili, one of the informants for Edward Sapir's Navaho Texts, carried out at the 1929 Laboratory of Anthropology Field School in the reservation town of Crystal, New Mexico, the article continues a recent line of research documenting ways that sessions of elicitation (particularly those conducted on site) have provided opportunities for "informants" to bring new "voices" into being- voices that were understood to have some bearing on role relations outside the ethnographic interview.

Loanwords and Stress in Tohono O'odham

Colleen M. Fitzgerald
State University of New York at Buffalo

Abstract. Tohono O'odham (formerly Papago) assigns primary stress to the first syllable in content words; but there is an asymmetry in the distribution of secondary stress, where the facts are more complicated. Polymorphemic words stress all odd syllables, whereas monomorphemic words stress only nonfinal odd syllables. The implications of this distribution for metrical stress theory are discussed. It is especially intriguing that the crucial support for the asymmetry comes exclusively from loanwords.

Another Look at Wappo-Yuki Loans

William W. Elmendorf
University of Wisconsin, Madison, and University of California

Alice Shepherd
Burbank, California

Abstract. This article reexamines the Wappo-Yuki resemblant lexical sets that Jesse O. Sawyer interpreted as loans in 1980. We demonstrate that many of these items are, in fact, analyzable in both languages, or otherwise cannot be identified as likely loans. In addition, many of the items are animal, plant, or cultural terms that are areal and would not be good examples to prove or disprove any kind of relationship. Once obvious loans and areal vocabulary are eliminated, many possible cognate sets remain. Consequently, it would be premature and unwarranted on the evidence to conclude that these languages are not genetically related.

Requests in Akan Discourse

Samuel Gyasi Obeng
Indiana University

Abstract. This article explores the linguistic and sequential structure of Akan requests, which are either direct or indirect. It is shown that direct requests are made as commands and may be preceded by an address form relating to the "requestee" and followed by a sentence justifying the request, whereas indirect requests are either conventional (i.e., expressed by hedging devices, acknowledgment of an imposition, and pronoun switching) or nonconventional (i.e., expressed by hints, proverbs, and metaphors). In both direct and indirect request events, the request-offer or request-refusal sequence may be interspersed with insertion sequences. Because of the collective nature of Akan society, requests are generally considered neither impositions nor a face-threat to the recipient, unless the requestee ignores the sociocultural and communicative contexts of the interaction.

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