Functional morphology in nahuatl language revitalization

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Title Functional morphology in nahuatl language revitalization
Publication Type dissertation
School or College College of Humanities
Department Linguistics
Author Pynes, Steven Jeffrey Jr.
Date 2017
Description The Nahuatl language of Mexico, like many other indigenous and minority languages, faces language shift in the face of globalization. The particular historical role of Nahuatl as the language of the Aztec Triple Alliance and as a Mesoamerican lingua franca in the late pre-Columbian and early colonial periods has left an unusually rich documentary history and attracted academic interest. Based on data drawn from the historical record along with observation and fieldwork performed while learning and later teaching Nahuatl, I demonstrate that the relatively common Nahuatl verbal morpheme -ti-, frequently labeled as a 'ligature' or 'connector' in the existing literature, acts as a meaningful functional morpheme in contemporary Eastern Huastecan Nahuatl that serves to index spatial information associated with the predicate. I then consider the ways in which spatial indexing in general is approached by native speaker instructors of Nahuatl as they teach speakers of Indo-European languages, which generally lack comparable structures. From this discussion, I draw suggestions for linguists and languages communities engaged in documentation and language revitalization.
Type Text
Publisher University of Utah
Subject Linguistics
Dissertation Name Doctor of Philosophy
Language eng
Rights Management (c) Steven Jeffrey Pynes Jr.
Format application/pdf
Format Medium application/pdf
ARK ark:/87278/s6n632r9
Setname ir_etd
ID 1426191
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6n632r9
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