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Nominal Contact in Michif. by Carrie Gillon and Nicole Rosen , with Verna De - Montigny

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Nominal Contact in Michif. by Carrie Gillon and Nicole Rosen , with Verna De - Montigny 806 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 9 5, NUMBER 4 (201 9) Corbett, Greville G. 2009. Canonical inflection classes. Selected proceedings of the 6th Décembrettes , ed. by Fabio Montermini, Gilles Boyé, and Jessie Tseng, 1–11. Online: http://www.lingref.com/cpp/decemb /6/paper2231.pdf . Dahl, Östen . 2004. The growth and maintenance of linguistic complexity . Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Harley, Heidi. 2008. When is a syncretism more than a syncretism? Impoverishment, metasyncretism, and underspecification. Phi theory: Phi-features across modules and interfaces , ed. by Daniel Harbour, David Adger, and Susana Béjar, 251–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parker, Jeff, and Andrea D. Sims. 2020. Irregularity, paradigmatic layers, and the complexity of inflection class systems: A study of Russian nouns. Morphological complexities , ed. by Peter Arkadiev and Francesco Gardani. Oxford: Oxford University Press, to appear. Sagot, Benoît, and Géraldine Walther. 2011 . Non-canonical inflection: Data, formalisation and com - plexity measures. SFCM 2011: The second workshop on Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology , ed. by Cerstin Mahlow and Michael Piotrowski, 23–45. Berlin: Springer. Stump, Gregory T . 2016. Inflectional paradigms: Content and form at the syntax-morphology interface . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zwicky, Arnold M. 1992. Some choices in the theory of morphology. Formal grammar: Theory and imple - mentation , ed. by Robert Levine, 327–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Department of Linguistics 1712 Neil Avenue Columbus, OH 43210 [[email protected]] Nominal contact in Michif. By Carrie Gillon and Nicole Rosen , with Verna De - montigny . (Oxford studies of endangered languages.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xxii, 202. ISBN 9780198795339. $88 (Hb). Reviewed by Sarah G. Thomason , University of Michigan This book is the fifth volume in the series ‘Oxford studies of endangered languages’, whose mission, according to the general preface by series editor Stephen R. Anderson, is to ‘support the publication of theoretically informed work on endangered languages, while striking a balance’ between the goals of basic description and contributions to theoretical concerns (ix). Carrie Gillon and Nicole Rosen (henceforth G&R), with Verna Demontigny, provide by far the most comprehensive description to date of noun phrases in Michif, which is perhaps the most- discussed bilingual mixed language in the language contact literature. Demontigny, identified as G&R’s ‘primary Michif language consultant’ (xi), is well known and highly respected as one of the most proficient native speakers of Michif and is a long-time teacher of the language. G&R credit her with providing the native-speaker intuitions that they prioritized in their analysis (4); but since the analysis itself is apparently G&R’s, they are cited as sole authors in this review. The main theoretical implication of G&R’s results, they argue, is that Michif is not a mixed language at all, but rather an Algonquian language with considerable French borrowing, prima - rily in the noun phrase. They then extend their conclusion to all other bilingual mixed languages, 1 concluding that there is ‘little synchronic motivation for a new category of “mixed languages ”’ (178), because all of the so-called mixed languages are ‘likely to behave mainly like one unified language, with some extra features from the other language, once the spotlight is on their struc - ture’ (169). 1 G&R use the simpler term ‘mixed languages’, following a common practice in contact linguistics. I use ‘bilingual mixed languages’ to distinguish these from pidgins and creoles, which in my view are also mixed languages, using the criterion of nongenetic historical development routes (see e.g. Thomason 2001:Chs. 7–8 and Thomason & Kaufman 1988). Printed with the permission of Sarah G. Thomason. © 2019. REVIEWS 807 In this review I begin by outlining G&R’s structural analysis of Michif noun phrases—DPs (determiner phrases), in their terminology. The reason for the focus on noun phrases is that Michif has generally been characterized as a language with Cree (Algonquian) verb phrases and sentential syntax but with French noun phrases. That is, the traditional claim (in e.g. Thomason & Kaufman 1988:228–33, Bakker 1997, and Bakker & Papen 1997) is that the Michif noun phrase comprises French lexicon, phonology, and grammar, while the verb phrase and sentential syntax are Cree. It is well known that Cree parts of the structure leak into the French noun phrases, but (with the exception of a very few borrowed French verb stems) not vice versa (e.g. Rhodes 1986:289). As an illustration, a typical Michif sentence is G&R’s ex. 4b (p. 8), reproduced below, where French-origin words are in plain type, the only Cree-origin word is in italics, and vti stands for a transitive inanimate verb stem. (1) Sae’nk lii sheezh ver n-dajaa-n five art.pl chair green 1-have. vti -1/2 ‘I have five green chairs’ After outlining the contents of the book’s main chapters, I comment on theoretical and method - ological issues that arise from the authors’ discussion. G&R’s presentation of the data and analyses is clear and for the most part easy to follow, even for scholars unfamiliar with their generative theoretical framework, and most of the specific analy - ses are convincing. Brief arguments against the mixed-language status of Michif are scattered throughout the text, but discussion of the broader theoretical issue—namely, whether mixed lan - guages exist—covers fewer than ten pages in all. As explained below, I find their theoretical claims about mixed languages problematic, both with respect to Michif and with respect to mixed lan - guages in general, including pidgins and creoles as well as bilingual mixed languages. Moreover, the book lacks adequate information about how the Michif data was collected, a crucial component of any linguistic analysis but especially vital for an analysis of an endangered language. After a guide to pronunciation and orthography and an introductory chapter sketching the his - tory and status of Michif, ‘general issues of language contact’, and an overview of Michif struc - ture, the authors address their main topic in the next five chapters: 2, ‘Mass/count’; 3, ‘Plurality’; 4, ‘Gender’; 5, ‘Articles’; and 6, ‘Demonstratives’ (with some further analysis of articles). The final chapter is 7, ‘Status of the category “mixed language”’. This chapter is followed by two use - ful appendices: A, ‘Plains Cree verbal paradigms’, and B, ‘Michif verbal paradigms’. There is some variation in the organization of the five main chapters, but they all connect the Michif facts and analytic possibilities to the theoretical literature in generative syntax, showing how Michif compares with structures in other languages and how it fits into the standard genera - tive picture. Most chapters outline the relevant patterns—mass vs. count nouns, number, gender, articles, and demonstratives—in French and in Algonquian languages generally, and then turn to a description of the patterns in Michif. G&R conclude in each case that Michif DP structure more closely resembles Algonquian structure than French structure. They acknowledge the existence of some French structure in Michif noun phrases, but they argue in several different ways against the traditional claim that the basic structure of Michif noun phrases is French. In Ch. 2, the authors conclude that, in Michif, French-origin nouns have a clear mass/count dis - tinction, as in French, while Algonquian-origin nouns (mostly from Cree but a few from Ojibwe) lack a clear distinction, as in Algonquian generally. This, they argue, indicates that ‘the split in Michif is not between DP and VP, but rather only between French-derived and Algonquian- derived nouns’ (47). From a more general syntactic perspective, they consider the lack of a clear distinction in the Algonquian part of Michif grammar to be evidence against those authors who argue that the distinction is universal crosslinguistically (47). G&R discuss various theories of plurality in Ch. 3, arguing that the two plural markers in Michif, the French-origin plural article lii and the Algonquian-origin plural suffix -a /-ak , cannot both be counting plurals, since they can cooccur (66). This is a surprising conclusion, since there are languages with double or discontinuous exponence of a counting plural (and of certain other grammatical categories), but the main point for the question of whether Michif is a mixed lan - 808 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 9 5, NUMBER 4 (201 9) guage is that the two markers cooccur only with Algonquian-origin nouns; French-origin nouns do not occur with the Algonquian suffix. Ch. 4, on gender in Michif, is the only chapter in the book that is no longer the most thorough treatment of the topic: Sammons 2019 is a much more extensive analysis of the gender categories of Michif, and it only partially supports G&R’s analysis in this chapter. Like other authors who have written about Michif gender, G&R analyze the language as having two different gender sys - tems: masculine/feminine sex-based gender as in French (lexically specified on both French- origin and Algonquian-origin nouns, for agreement with articles, possessives, and prenominal adjectives) and animate/inanimate gender as in Algonquian (lexically specified on both French- origin and Algonquian-origin nouns, because of agreement patterns with demonstratives and verbs). They predict that the sex-based gender system will decay over time because it is less ro - bust than the animacy gender system, admitting that ‘this prediction is speculative’ (105). The important point, for them, is that a ‘coherent analysis’ of Michif is possible because other (non - mixed) languages are known to have mixed gender systems, so that no ‘extra or special structure’ is needed for Michif (106). Sammons agrees that the amount of variability in sex-based gender assignment, together with its limited scope in noun-phrase grammar, might support a prediction that the French-origin gender system is diachronically unstable.
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