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Building Meaning in Navajo University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses March 2016 Building Meaning in Navajo Elizabeth A. Bogal-Allbritten University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Semantics and Pragmatics Commons Recommended Citation Bogal-Allbritten, Elizabeth A., "Building Meaning in Navajo" (2016). Doctoral Dissertations. 552. https://doi.org/10.7275/7646815.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/552 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BUILDING MEANING IN NAVAJO A Dissertation Presented by ELIZABETH BOGAL-ALLBRITTEN Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2016 Linguistics © Copyright by Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten 2016 All Rights Reserved BUILDING MEANING IN NAVAJO A Dissertation Presented by ELIZABETH BOGAL-ALLBRITTEN Approved as to style and content by: Rajesh Bhatt, Chair Seth Cable, Member Angelika Kratzer, Member Margaret Speas, Member Alejandro Perez-Carballo, Member John Kingston, Head of Department Linguistics DEDICATION To my parents, Rose and Bill. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I thank the members of my committee. I came to the Univer- sity of Massachusetts because of my admiration for the work done by Rajesh Bhatt, Seth Cable, Angelika Kratzer, and Peggy Speas. That admiration has only grown during the dissertation process. I thank my chair, Rajesh Bhatt, who has been a tire- less mentor to me through all stages of my graduate career: from the first workshop, through the job market, and, of course, through the dissertation. I thank Angelika Kratzer for the puzzles which she made clear to me and the precision in argumenta- tion which she encouraged me to pursue. I thank Seth Cable for providing me with a model for how to address theoretical questions with careful fieldwork. I thank Peggy Speas for sharing with me her expertise in Navajo linguistics and for guiding me even before I got to UMass. I thank Alejandro Pérez-Carballo for his insightful comments on my dissertation and at my defense. This dissertation would not exist without the knowledge and patience of the Navajo mentors and consultants that I have been fortunate to work with: Ellavina Perkins, Leroy Morgan, Irene Tsosie, Louise Kerley, Johnny Harvey, Louise Ramone, and Irene Silentman. Special thanks is due to Ellavina Perkins: I cannot overstate how grateful I am for her willingness to explain things to me just one more time. Al- most all of the work reported here was done concurrently with the Navajo Language Academy (Diné Bizaad Naalkaah). I thank Irene Silentman and Lorene Legah for the hard work they do to organize the workshop every year. Finally, I thank Ted Fer- nald for his mentorship as I learned to teach and research linguistics at Swarthmore College and at the Navajo Language Academy. v This dissertation owes a great debt to people who are at UMass but whose names do not appear on my cover sheet. In particular, I thank Kyle Johnson for the morale- boosting talks and Ilaria Frana, Lyn Frazier, Lisa Green, John McCarthy, Barbara Partee, Joe Pater, Tom Roeper, and Ellen Woolford for wonderful classes. Finally, I thank the people who kept the department — and me — on track: Kathy Adamczyk, Sarah Vega-Liros, Michelle McBride, and, finally, Tom Maxfield, whose ability to navigate administrative hurdles has saved me more than a few times. I thank the broader linguistics community beyond UMass and the Navajo Lan- guage Academy. The material in Chapters 3 and 4 benefited from audiences at presentations made at the University of Toronto, the University at Albany - SUNY, the University of Maryland at College Park, SULA 8, and the 2015 meeting of the LSA in Portland. The proposals in Chapter 5 were shaped by comments received at presentations at the Universität Tübingen and at MIT, and by the detailed com- ments offered by reviewers at Natural Language Semantics. Particular thanks go to Sigrid Beck, James Crippen, Valentine Hacquard, Irene Heim, Chris Kennedy, Lisa Matthewson, Keren Rice, Maribel Romero, Leslie Saxon, and Roger Schwarzschild. The research reported here would not have been possible without financial sup- port from several sources. Fieldwork and research prior to 2015 was funded by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and by a grant awarded by the Selkirk Linguistics Outreach Fund at the University of Mas- sachusetts. Later fieldwork and dissemination of findings was made possible bya Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the NSF ([#BCS-1451265]) and an NSF grant ([#BCS-1322770]) awarded to Seth Cable. Thank you to the denizens of South College Room 311 — Minta Elsman, Hannah Greene, Claire Moore-Cantwell, Jason Overfelt, Jérémy Pasquereau, Presley Pizzo, and Robert Staubs — for the long chats on life and linguistics, the lambda cupcakes, and the loud hilarity that would ensue on a daily basis. (For anyone whose office was vi within earshot of ours, I apologize retroactively!) Thank you to all of the other friends who made the Pioneer Valley a great place to be, especially Caroline Andrews, María Biezma, Mike Clauss, Ivy Hauser, Matt Hine, Leland Kusmer, Josh Levy, Suzi Lima, Andrew McKenzie, Jon Ander Mendia, Ali Neyers, Paczki, Yangsook Park, Amanda Rysling, Anisa Schardl, Shayne Sloggett, Brian Smith, and Megan Somerday. Many thanks are also in order for friends and family from beyond the Pioneer Valley. Thank you to my friends from Swarthmore and Murray — especially Cara Arcuni, Brett Brown, Marina Lima, Allison McCarthy, Dianne Seo, Jason Shelby, and Daisy Yuhas — who were always there for me, virtually or in person, in spite of the long distances between us and my often erratic rate of response to emails. Thank you to the family I now have in Scotland, Sandra and Bryce Weir, whose support I always felt despite the ocean in the way. Finally, thank you to my Great Uncle Mike, whose wry sense of humor I miss greatly; I wish you could have seen all of the wonderful things that happened over the last year. I cannot begin to think how to properly thank my parents, Rose and Bill, for the love, encouragement, and boundless energy which they have shown me. As I write this, you are in town helping me to pack up and move to my next adventure. Thank you for making all of this possible. I dedicate this dissertation to you. Finally, Andrew Weir. When I started out on this journey in September of 2009, I imagined that a lot would happen, but I could not have imagined you. You have given me perspective, support, dinner when I forgot to eat, rides to and from airports at ungodly hours, the (more than) occasional linguistic judgment, and, most of all, love. Whatever continents and timezones try to stand in our way, we will always be each other’s person. vii ABSTRACT BUILDING MEANING IN NAVAJO FEBRUARY 2016 ELIZABETH BOGAL-ALLBRITTEN B.A., SWARTHMORE COLLEGE Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Rajesh Bhatt This dissertation contributes to the growing tradition of work in which detailed exploration of understudied languages informs formal semantic and syntactic theory and probes the tension between crosslinguistic grammatical variation and crosslinguis- tic commonality in communicative goals. The dissertation focuses on two topics in Navajo (Diné Bizaad): (i) attitudes of ‘thinking’ and ‘desiring’ and (ii) the expression of adjectival meaning and degree constructions. The first part of the dissertation presents the methodological and linguistic back- ground for the rest of the dissertation. Chapter 1 discusses the project of crosslin- guistic semantic research and fieldwork methodology. Chapter 2 gives a broad intro- duction to the Navajo language and the literature which has explored it. The second part of the dissertation focuses on the expression of attitudes in Navajo. Chapter 3 presents an empirically rich description of the morphological, syntactic, and semantic characteristics of Navajo sentences that report distinct at- viii titudes of ‘thinking’ and ‘desiring’ despite containing the same attitude verb, nisin. Chapter 4 argues that the meaning of the embedded clause — not nisin — determines what attitude is reported. The exploration of Navajo is guided by investigation of English and German attitude reports begun by Kratzer (2006, 2013a) and developed by Moulton (2009, 2015). These authors develop a fully compositional account that presents an alternative to familiar verb-driven analyses of attitude reports; in their account, key aspects of the semantics of attitude reports come from material in the embedded clause. It is argued here that Navajo is a limiting case within the em- pirical landscape explored by Kratzer and Moulton, in which the attitude verb only determines the attitude holder. The third part of the dissertation (Chapter 5) builds on work published as Bogal- Allbritten (2013) and investigates the syntax and semantics of Navajo adjectival expressions and degree constructions, e.g. comparative and equative constructions. Chapter 5 argues that while all Navajo adjectival expressions have the
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