A Survey of Menominee Word Order

A Survey of Menominee Word Order MEREDITH JOHNSON, MONICA MACAULAY, BRYAN ROSEN, AND RACHEL WANG University of Wisconsin–Madison INTRODUCTION1 There has been considerable work done on word order in various Algonquian languages,2 but relatively little on word order in Menominee. The purpose of this paper is to expand on the work that has been done (primarily Bloom¿eld 1962 and Shields 2004), and to provide an explanation for the different word orders found in Menominee. Our research shows that there tends to be more variation preverbally than postverbally, and we conclude that preverbal arguments are associated with either a topic or focus interpretation, while postverbal arguments are in a pragmatically neutral position. Bloom¿eld (1962) includes two chapters on syntax, but the categories and analysis of his era are sometimes dif¿cult to translate into more current notions. Bloom¿eld’s grammar does provide us with the word order generalizations given in (1) below. (1) Menominee word order generalizations (Bloom¿eld 1962:442–443) • An actor mostly comes after the verb. • An obviative actor usually precedes a TA verb. 1. We are grateful to our Algonquian syntax reading group (especially Becky Shields), Joe Salmons, Rand Valentine, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on this paper; all errors are, of course, our own. Thanks also to Menominee elders Marie Floring and Lawrence Tomow, for helping us with Menominee language examples, as well as to the Menominee Language and Culture Commission for their guidance. This paper is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0235873 and 0553958, and several grants from the University of Wisconsin–Madison Graduate School. 2. E.g., Bloom¿eld (1962), Tomlin and Rhodes (1977), Dahlstrom (1993, 1995, 2003, 2004), Mühlbauer (2003), Junker (2004), Wolvengrey (2011), among many others. 154 A SURVEY OF MENOMINEE WORD ORDER 155 • If an obviative actor precedes the verb, the object usually follows the verb. • A predicator as actor precedes [the verb].3 • Objects usually precede the verb, but often follow it. At the same time, Bloom¿eld also hinted at a pragmatic component to Menominee word order, saying: “The constituents of a phrase often appear in other than the usual order, or separated by other words, or with pause intonation between them, or with two or all three of these. Forms of this kind imply special emphasis, especially on a constituent that is spoken ¿rst” (1962:440). Shields (2004:374) summarizes Bloom¿eld’s claims as follows: “the most neutral orders are OVS (TA direct, TI), SVO (TA inverse), and VS (AI, II).” Shields herself makes the observations in (2), based on a study of four texts collected by Bloom¿eld in the 1920s. (2) Menominee word order generalizations (Shields 2004:380–384) • Overt arguments appear postverbally more often than preverbally. • Overt arguments are more likely to appear preverbally when the verb is in independent order than when it is in conjunct order. • Obviative subjects are more likely to appear preverbally, while obviative objects are more likely to appear postverbally. • New discourse referents, pronominals, quanti¿ers, and relative clause heads tend to appear preverbally. Shields also conducted an elicitation experiment with two native speakers, in which she tracked the position of overt arguments in a brief narrative. The results corroborated the ¿ndings of her text study: new discourse referents were preverbal, while de¿nite arguments were postverbal. She concludes from her two studies that new discourse referents and quanti¿ed phrases appear in focus position, and explains this by noting that this kind of element is neither de¿nite nor presupposed, which is compatible with focus. Our ¿ndings support the observations of Bloom¿eld and Shields, but show more explicitly the discourse basis of preverbal word order. 3. “Predicator” is de¿ned below. 156 JOHNSON, MACAULAY, ROSEN, AND WANG Discrepancies between what they describe and what we ¿nd are explained by appealing to the function (topic or focus) of preverbal NPs. In what follows, we ¿rst provide quantitative data showing the word order tendencies that we found in the 48 texts that we examined. The section after that discusses the role that the discourse notions of topic and focus play in determining word order, and the subsequent section brieÀy addresses the theoretical implications of our ¿ndings. The last section concludes the paper. QUANTITATIVE DATA In order to get an overview of word order tendencies in Menominee, we coded all of the clauses in a corpus of 48 texts, according to verb type.4 Menominee verbs fall into four orders: independent, negative, conjunct, and imperative; however, for the purposes of this study, only the ¿rst three were considered. The only other clauses excluded from the study were those in which it was debatable what the arguments of the verb were, such as those with passive verbs. Arguments in the clauses were classi¿ed based on several criteria: grammatical relation (subject or object), position (preverbal or postverbal), and category (pronoun, proper noun, or noun phrase). In each table below, the columns for the categories pronoun (PRO), proper noun (PN), and noun phrase (NP) are followed by columns for three subcategories of NP: NA (animate noun), NI (inanimate noun), and OBV (obviative). Thus, the total for each row is the sum of the contents of the ¿rst three columns only, while the total of the NP column is the sum of the NA and NI columns, and the OBV column is a subset of the NA column. The results from the analysis of clauses containing independent order verbs are presented in Tables 1 and 2. Table 1 includes verbs with one overt argument, and Table 2 includes verbs with both an overt subject and object. 4. Most of the texts come from Bloom¿eld 1928; see Appendix A for a list of sources cited. We found no noticeable differences in word order tendencies between Bloom¿eld’s texts and the contemporary texts we considered. TABLE 1: Independent with one argument PRO PN NP NA NI OBV TOTAL SV 17 12 75 66 9 7 104 VS 3 23 91 78 13 8 117 OV 7 1 49 34 15 11 57 VO 2 3 58 46 12 26 63 TABLE 2: Independent with two arguments SUBJECT OBJECT TOTAL PRO PN NP NA NI OBV PRO PN NP NA NI OBV SVO 1 1 8 8 0 0 1 0 9 7 2 7 10 OVS 1 1 3 2 1 0 1 1 3 2 1 0 5 VSO 0 2 1 1 0 0 0 0 3 3 0 3 3 VOS 0 3 2 2 0 0 0 0 5 5 0 5 5 SOV 1 1 3 3 0 0 2 0 3 2 1 2 5 OSV 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 158 JOHNSON, MACAULAY, ROSEN, AND WANG As the tables show, postverbal subjects and objects are slightly more common than preverbal ones. However, pronominal subjects and objects are much more likely to be preverbal. Inanimate subjects are more likely to be postverbal, but inanimate objects are more likely to be preverbal. Obvia- tive subjects are equally likely to be preverbal or postverbal, but obviative objects are more than twice as likely to be postverbal than preverbal. The small sample size of verbs with both an overt subject and object makes it dif¿cult to say much about the relative ordering of subjects and objects; note, however, that the most common order is SVO, and the least common is OSV. Tables 3 and 4 (p. 159) show the results from verbs in negative order. In contrast to independent order clauses, subjects and objects of negative order clauses, regardless of category, are more likely to be preverbal than postverbal. Just as in independent order, however, there is a strong tendency for pronominal subjects and objects to be preverbal. There is only one example of a negative order verb with an overt subject and object, and the relative order of the arguments is SOV. However, negative order in general is relatively rare in our corpus of texts, and thus any generalizations we draw here are extremely tentative. Tables 5 and 6 (p. 160) show the distribution of arguments of conjunct order verbs. Overall, preverbal subjects are more common in conjunct order than postverbal ones, and postverbal objects are more common than preverbal ones. This holds for pronominals, inanimates, and obviative subjects and objects. The most common order in clauses with two overt arguments is SOV, while the least common orders are verb-initial: VSO and VOS. Tables 7 and 8 (p. 161) show the distribution of verbs in conjunct order that include what we call the “eneq construction.” We take this construction up in detail in the following section, but suf¿ce it to say for now that eneq is an inÀected pronoun (or “predicative,” in Bloom¿eld’s terms) that is used to mark a focused element, and requires a following verb in conjunct order. Tables 7 and 8 show the distribution of subjects and objects with respect to both the verb and eneq. As we can see, it is again more common to have preverbal subjects and postverbal objects. Eneq is most often found initially, although subjects and objects can occasionally precede it. Note, however, that the verb never precedes eneq. TABLE 3: Negative with one argument PRO PN NP NA NI OBV TOTAL SV 4 0 5 4 1 1 9 VS 0 1 1 1 0 0 2 OV 9 0 0 0 0 0 9 VO 1 0 4 2 2 0 5 TABLE 4: Negative with two arguments SUBJECT OBJECT TOTAL PRO PN NP NA NI OBV PRO PN NP NA NI OBV SVO 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 OVS 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 VSO 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 VOS 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 SOV 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 OSV 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 TABLE 5: Conjunct with one argument PRO PN NP NA NI OBV TOTAL SV 50 7 71 57 14 15 128 VS 8 5 82 74 8 12 95 OV 9 0 46 28 18 18 55 VO 16 1 54 32 22 24 71 TABLE 6: Conjunct with two arguments SUBJECT OBJECT TOTAL PRO PN NP NA

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