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The First Language Acquisition of Nominal Inflection in Northern East Cree: Possessives and Nouns

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The First Language Acquisition of Nominal Inflection in Northern East Cree: Possessives and Nouns THE FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION OF NOMINAL INFLECTION IN NORTHERN EAST CREE: POSSESSIVES AND NOUNS A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Division of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN LINGUISTICS May 2020 Ryan E. Henke Dissertation Committee: Kamil U. Deen, Chairperson Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker Julie Brittain William O’Grady Ashley Maynard To Sarah, for everything. ii Acknowledgements This dissertation represents only part of a long journey that began years ago, and nothing on the path to completing this study could have happened without support and generosity from far too many people to thank adequately here. I don’t even know where to begin, but I extend my deepest thanks to people and organizations such as: Chief Davey Bobbish, Deputy Chief Daisy House, and the Council of the Cree Nation of Chisasibi, for supporting this dissertation project; The Cree School Board, for their interest, support, and working space; Susan Runnels, Sarah Pash, Brian Dioszeghy, and the rest of their family for sharing their home and hospitality; Margaret, for sharing more knowledge, time, tea, and snacks than I could ever remember; Betsy and Lucy Shem for their generosity and warm introduction to their community; Darlene Bearskin, for sharing her invaluable insight, memories, and good humor; Andrea Berez-Kroeker, who has been my mentor, advocate, and biggest supporter from the beginning; Kamil Deen, for introducing me to language acquisition, and for his guidance and mentorship throughout this process; Julie Brittain, for putting her faith in me, welcoming me to the CCLAS project, and making all of this possible; Marguerite MacKenzie, for her expertise, hospitality, and a once-in-a-lifetime introduction to Chisasibi; William O’Grady, for challenging me and encouraging my growth as a scholar; Jordan Lachler, Conor Snoek, Faun Rice, and Élise Hervieux for letting me be a part of the inspiring world of CILLDI; Sally Rice, for her counsel and generous hospitality; Eugene Alexis, Sherry Letendre, Liz Letendre, Jonah Letendre, and Bevan Janzen, for welcoming me, sharing their knowledge, and allowing me to contribute to their important work at Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation; iii Lewis Gebhardt and Rick Hallett, for introducing me to the world of linguistics; Dorothea Hoffmann, for giving me my first chance to do linguistic research; Vincent Gautier-Doucet, for the advice and beautiful hikes; Ashley Maynard, for her perspective and feedback; Sherri Racine, for being a great boss and letting me leave work early to take night classes in linguistics; and Ivan Bondoc, Amber Camp, Khairunnisa, Andrew Pick, Peter Schuelke—and too many other friends and colleagues from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa to include here— for all of the support and fun I’ve been lucky enough to share with you. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number 1912062. Thank you also to the Bilinski Educational Foundation and the American Philosophical Society for providing grant support for aspects of this project. iv Abstract This dissertation describes the first language (L1) acquisition of nominal inflection in Northern East Cree (NEC), a member of the Cree-Innu-Naskapi dialect complex within the Algonquian language family, which is spoken in four Eeyou Istchee communities in Northern Québec. The category of nominals includes nouns, demonstratives, and pronouns, where nouns inflect with templatic morphology involving one prefix and four suffix positions. This study focuses primarily upon nouns within possessive constructions, which entail the richest range of inflectional possibilities and mark multiple inflectional features of both possessees and possessors—including grammatical animacy, obviation, and number. This is the first dedicated study of the L1 acquisition of possessive marking within a polysynthetic language, and this dissertation aims to provide findings to inform linguistic science as well as community-centered efforts in L1 development and language revitalization. Data come from the corpus of the Chisasibi Child Language Acquisition Study (CCLAS), a collection of naturalistic video recordings. These recordings represent the speech of three children—Ani (age 2;01.12–4;03.07), Daisy (3;08.10–5;10.02), and Billy (4;05.04–5;10.06)—as well as of one adult who interacts with each of the children. This dissertation revolves around three primary research questions, which center on the characteristics of nominal inflection in child-directed speech; the expression of possession by children before they acquire the adult-like usage of nominal inflection; and the path of emergence for each templatic position and its morphological components over time. In answering these research questions, the chapters largely proceed along the inflectional template for NEC nouns, analyzing child-directed speech and then the speech of each child. After describing the overall landscape of the data, the examination turns to the prefix marking the person of the possessor; the possessive suffix; the suffixes marking a plural or obviative possessor; and the final affixal position, which can carry either a locative suffix or a multiple- exponence suffix marking interacting categories of animacy, obviation, and number. Findings show that child-directed speech employs all of the affixal positions for nouns and all of their component morphemes, and although not all inflectional categories and values are equally represented, the input provides children with the necessary evidence to identify the presence, function, and distribution of all inflectional morphology. The youngest child begins v expressing possession by omitting noun inflection, and she tends to use demonstratives instead of nouns as possessees. Each of the three children demonstrate different levels of productive usage with various inflectional morphemes, which is at least in some part attributable to differences in age as well as to the inter-child variability common in L1 acquisition. Child production may have some connections to patterns in the input, such as the frequency of word forms and inflectional morphemes, but the children also show a command of NEC inflection with English borrowings, which is a relatively uncommon pattern in the child-directed speech within the CCLAS corpus. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... vii List of Tables ............................................................................................................................. xviii List of Figures ............................................................................................................................. xxv Abbreviations ............................................................................................................................. xxvi Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Motivation for this study ................................................................................................... 1 1.2. Dissertation overview ....................................................................................................... 2 1.3. The “researcher” ............................................................................................................... 3 1.4. Some terminological notes ................................................................................................ 5 Chapter 2: Northern East Cree ........................................................................................................ 7 2.1. Example utterances: Orthographical conventions and citations ....................................... 7 2.2. NEC: Speakers and language vitality ............................................................................... 9 2.3. Grammatical characteristics of NEC .............................................................................. 12 2.3.1. Polysynthesis in NEC .............................................................................................. 12 2.3.2. Nominals and nominal inflection in NEC ............................................................... 15 2.3.2.1. Nouns and inflection ......................................................................................... 16 2.3.2.2. Demonstratives and inflection ........................................................................... 33 2.3.2.3. Pronouns and inflection ..................................................................................... 38 2.3.3. Summary .................................................................................................................. 41 Chapter 3: A brief literature review .............................................................................................. 43 3.1. The L1 acquisition of polysynthesis ................................................................................ 43 3.2. The L1 acquisition of possessive encoding ....................................................................
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