Winuunsi tm talapaas: A grammar of the Molalla language.

Abstract

This dissertation represents the first comprehensive grammar of Molalla, an extinct Native American language. The Molalla were a hunting and gathering society who lived in western Oregon. They were never particularly numerous, and by the time the last speaker died in 1958, Molalla had been out of daily use for several decades. Though the language is quite well documented, particularly through the efforts of Albert Gatschet, Leo Frachtenberg, Melville Jacobs, and Morris Swadesh, relatively little has been written about it. Among the salient features of Molalla phonology are a stop system comprised of plain and ejective stops, and possibly aspirated stops, too, though the latter two categories are comparatively rare. There is also a velar nasal and a fairly large array of fricatives. Acoustic analysis of a Molalla recording reveals a surface complement of three short and four long vowels, though the low short vowel may represent a merger of two originally distinct vowels. Morphologically, Molalla is characterized by a highly intricate verb-stem structure. The verb also exhibits a rich system of seven tense-aspect morphemes distinguishing recent and distant past; verb-internal negation; a typologically unusual non-topical subject morpheme (which often functions like, but formally is not, a passive construction); gender agreement (manifested only on the verb); special subordinating morphology; and a highly productive cislocative morpheme that interacts with the subject agreement morphology in highly complex ways. There are two copula verbs, one for animate and one for inanimate subjects. Nouns display a system of seven cases, some of which have different allomorphs for use with animate or inanimate nouns. Possession is shown by genitive marking on the possessor, possessive enclitics on the possessed noun, or both. Personal pronouns show no distinction between inclusive and exclusive 1du and 1pl forms and have their own unique case inflections. Demonstratives inflect for an additional case specifically for units of time. Adjectives are a morphologically well-defined category at the word level, inflecting for person and number like verbs and for case like nouns. Syntactically, Molalla shows highly flexible constituent ordering. A system of second-position clitics carries modal, evidential, conjunctive, and focusing functions. Negative sentences are doubly marked. Typologically interesting syntactic features include frequent use of redundant pronouns and a possible serial verb construction. The title of the dissertation, <italic>Winuunsi Tm Talapaas</italic>, translates to 'Coyote was traveling'. This title, taken from the first line of one of the myths collected by Frachtenberg, reflects the importance of the Coyote figure as trickster and transformer in the recorded texts.