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Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. A GRAMMATICAL DESCRIPTION OF TARAHUMARA The members of the Committee approve the masters thesis of Diana Cohen Donald A. Burquest Supervising Professor Jerold A. Edmondson Shin Ja Hwang A&- ------ Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. To Luterio Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. A GRAMMATICAL DESCRIPTION OF TARAHUMARA by DIANA COHEN Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN LINGUISTICS THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON August 1998 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 1391439 UMI Microform 1391489 Copyright 1998, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Everything I have is ultimately a gift from some generous person who was willing to supply me with something useful from their own stores. With particular reference to this thesis, if others had not shared their time, expertise and resources so unstintingly with me, I would have nothing further to offer in the investigation of the fascinating Tarahumara language. Dr. Don Burquest, my supervising professor, first provided a foundation in the theory used in this work through his tireless teaching and willingness to explain puzzling points of the theory again and again. Then his close, uncomplaining readings of an overly-long draft and his careful recommendations allowed the project, from a shapeless mass of words, to take the form of a thesis. His wise counsel saved the day a number of times and kept my work moving forward when I thought it was at an impasse. Dr. Jerry Edmondson cheerfully invested much time from his demanding schedule to bring to my attention a number of issues that lay buried within the thesis and to provide his unique and broad perspective on these issues. I am particularly grateful for the sense of value he attached to this study. Dr. Shin Ja Hwang first made clear to me the significance and genius of text analysis, which plays an essential role in this study. Besides providing me with resources on Tarahumara and contacts with others who have worked on Tarahumara, she also assisted me to envision the project and make a bold start, and then to carry it through carefully. iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Dr. Susan Herring sparked my interest in the Tarahumara language by her own admiration for its unusual characteristics. Not only did she place resources and contacts for Tarahumara into my hands, she also supplied me, far beyond the duties of the classroom, with abundant, well- considered comments regarding interpretations of its structures. Karen McIntosh consistently gives forth a glad fountain of good counsel, reassurance and courage to persevere. Like a superb parent, she makes each student feel that he or she is the one she is most concerned about, when in fact she is an enthusiastic supporter of every one of us. Margaret and George have been faithful encouragers, always understanding so completely the moods and stages of writing and deftly offering the very words of hopeful support that could adjust my perspective upward and onward. My father’s comments about this project have always included a casual “You can do it!” that helped immensely in keeping the project in perspective and not relying upon its outcome for a definition of my identity. Ken and Martha Hilton labored meticulously to provide the New Testament translation in Tarahumara as well as some other excellent materials in the language. I am grateful for their unselfish provision of materials to students of Tarahumara and for their gracious permission to use the corpus of texts that they gathered. Paul and Ellen Carlson provided plentiful study materials on Tarahumara to my family long ago in expectation of their usefulness, little suspecting that I would employ them in preparing a thesis. If these materials had not been so readily available, perhaps it would never have occurred to me to explore the intricacies of Tarahumara. V Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Wes Shoemaker, immediately upon receiving my inquiry, sent an enthusiastic letter of support for further analysis of the complex grammar of Tarahumara. I greatly appreciate his unselfish interest. Don Burgess has already published invaluable theoretical and descriptive materials on Tarahumara. Willing to help beyond making these resources generally available, he readily assisted me in this study with timely letters of encouragement, with mailings of recent publications and with kind permission to use texts he had gathered. Dr. Jim Copeland has published striking discoveries in the Tarahumara language based on extensive research. These insights contribute immeasurably towards an understanding of pho­ nological and syntactic variability in language. It was reading about these discoveries, at the recommendation of my teachers, that aroused my interest in the great flexibility of Tarahumara and drew me in to studying it for myself. I am vastly indebted to these special people who have made this study possible, and hereby express my sincere appreciation to each one. Most of all, however, I thank my unchanging heavenly Father, who gives daily life and breath, strength and grace. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variable­ ness, neither shadow of turning” (Jas 1:17, KJV). May 6, 1998 vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT A GRAMMATICAL DESCRIPTION OF TARAHUMARA Publication No. _______ Diana Cohen, M.A. The University of Texas at Arlington, 1998 Supervising Professor: Donald A. Burquest The Uto-Aztecan language Tarahumara demonstrates such a high degree of syntactic variability that some linguists have questioned whether the language lends itself to construction of a formal grammar. This work attempts to construct such a formal account of the syntax through application of Government and Binding theory to data from ten spoken and four written texts. Methodology of functional origin gives attention to discourse context of data so as to discover explanations for observed variability in forms. Results o f the study indicate that the binary- branching hierarchical configurations of Government and Binding theory accommodate the Tarahumara data adequately, allowing all noun phrases to be properly governed and licensed. The theory posits NP-movement and Wh-movement transformations to account for the many depar­ tures from basic SOV word order. Pragmatic functions, including emphasis, special focus, discourse organization and ease of cognitive processing, are able to explain preposing and post- posing of most re-ordered constituents.