THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO ARGUMENT STRUCTURE IN LANGUAGE SHIFT: MORPHOSYNTACTIC VARIATION AND GRAMMATICAL RESILIENCE IN MODERN CHUKCHI A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS BY JESSICA KANTAROVICH CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2020 Copyright © 2020 by Jessica Kantarovich All Rights Reserved Dedicated to the Chukchi people, who exemplify resilience Table of Contents List of Figures ......................................... ix List of Tables .......................................... x Acknowledgments ....................................... xii Abstract ............................................. xv Glossing Conventions .....................................xvii 1 Introduction ........................................ 1 1.1 The position of endangered language grammars in linguistics . .1 1.1.1 Questions of language contact and change in shifting communities . .2 1.1.2 Mixed grammars and syntactic theory . .5 1.1.3 L1 and L2 acquisition and heritage speech . .7 1.2 The encoding of argument structure in Chukchi . .9 1.3 Findings among modern Chukchi speakers . 13 1.3.1 Significant conclusions beyond Chukchi . 16 1.4 A sociolinguistic introduction to Chukchi . 17 1.4.1 A historical and typological profile of the Chukchi language . 17 1.4.2 Documentation and variation . 19 1.4.3 Social change in the 20th century and its effects on language maintenance . 26 1.4.4 Speaker groups . 31 1.5 Methodology . 35 1.5.1 Targeted text collection . 36 1.5.2 Experimental production tasks . 38 1.5.3 Challenges in employing experimental methods in the field . 39 1.6 A note on phonology and transcription . 43 iv 1.7 A note on Chukchi glosses . 44 1.8 The roadmap . 44 2 Language contact, argument structure, and polysynthesis . 46 2.1 Theories of language contact . 46 2.1.1 Language contact involving Chukchi . 54 2.1.2 Outstanding theoretical questions about language contact . 62 2.2 Argument structure in contact . 66 2.2.1 Expected effects in Chukchi . 71 2.3 Implications for theories of polysynthesis . 74 2.4 Alignment and argument structure of Chukchi . 85 2.4.1 Morphological and syntactic ergativity . 85 2.5 Valency-changing operations . 95 2.5.1 Antipassives . 96 2.5.2 Applicatives . 97 2.5.3 Noun incorporation . 99 2.5.4 Expected changes . 101 2.6 Syntactic operations: the interaction of word order, argument drop, and agreement . 104 2.6.1 Expected changes in degree of polysynthesis . 107 2.6.2 Potential effects of argument drop . 107 2.6.3 Inverse marking . 109 2.6.4 Implications for a feature-copying analysis . 109 2.6.5 Case study: The linguistic system of one Chukchi speaker in Yakutsk . 110 2.7 Conclusion . 116 2.7.1 Other signs of language shift . 116 2.7.2 A broader survey of argument structure . 118 v 3 Ergativity and transitivity phenomena in Modern Chukchi morphology . 119 3.1 Loss and maintenance of ergative patterns . 119 3.1.1 The status of ergativity in Chukchi . 119 3.1.2 Other transitivity phenomena . 122 3.2 Case marking in modern Chukchi . 124 3.2.1 Animacy and noun class membership . 126 3.2.2 Changes to the alignment of core grammatical case marking . 130 3.3 Agreement marking in modern Chukchi . 131 3.3.1 Syntax of agreement marking in traditional Chukchi . 131 3.3.2 Alignment of agreement affixes in modern Chukchi . 150 3.3.3 Evaluating theories of Chukchi agreement marking in light of modern speech patterns . 167 3.4 Predicate semantics and semantic role assignment . 171 3.5 Conclusion: evaluating the mechanisms of change in Chukchi transitivity phenomena178 3.5.1 Review of changes to ergative-absolutive morphological phenomena . 180 3.5.2 Loss of ine- and changes to syntactic ergativity . 182 4 Valency-changing operations in Modern Chukchi . 184 4.1 Variation in valency-changing operations in existing Chukchi descriptions . 184 4.1.1 Valency-increasing derivational morphology . 185 4.1.2 Valency-decreasing and valency-rearranging derivational morphology . 187 4.1.3 Noun incorporation . 192 4.2 Verbal derivation and productivity in language shift . 196 4.3 Maintenance of voice morphology . 204 4.3.1 Maintenance of valency-increasing (causative and applicative) morphology 204 4.3.2 Maintenance of valency-rearranging morphology (ine- applicative) . 212 4.3.3 Maintenance of valency-reducing morphology (antipassives) . 216 4.3.4 Overall changes to the productivity of voice morphology . 222 vi 4.4 Patterns of syntactic noun incorporation in Modern Chukchi . 223 4.4.1 Type I noun incorporation . 224 4.4.2 Type II noun incorporation . 227 4.4.3 Type III noun incorporation . 229 4.4.4 Productivity of noun incorporation with different argument types . 235 4.4.5 Assessing variation and change in noun incorporation . 237 4.5 Changes to syntactic ergativity . 239 4.5.1 Cross-clausal co-reference in coordination . 240 4.5.2 Verbal participles . 246 4.6 Evaluating theories of noun incorporation and antipassivization . 251 4.6.1 The relationship between noun incorporation and the antipassive in Chukchi 251 4.6.2 Lexicalist vs. syntactic theories of noun incorporation: answers from Chukchi . 255 4.7 Conclusion: conditioning factors in derivational variation and change . 260 5 Changes to polysynthesis in Modern Chukchi . 265 5.1 Features of polysynthesis . 265 5.2 Changes to the prevalence of argument drop . 267 5.2.1 The alternative: strong maintenance of core case marking . 274 5.3 Derivational productivity . 275 5.3.1 Analytic phenomena in traditional Chukchi . 276 5.3.2 Differences in the use of productive derivational morphology . 277 5.3.3 Modifier incorporation vs. predicative modification . 280 5.3.4 Use of non-finite morphosyntax . 284 5.3.5 Other emergent analytic phenomena . 288 5.4 Degrees of polysynthesis in verbs and nouns . 292 5.5 Implications for theories of polysynthesis . 299 5.6 Explaining changes to polysynthesis . 307 vii 6 The syntax of language endangerment in context . 311 6.1 Revisiting the shift-driven changes to Chukchi argument encoding . 311 6.1.1 The nature of morphosyntactic variation in an endangered language . 316 6.2 Disentangling different sources of change in language endangerment . 319 6.3 Implications for typology and language universals . 324 6.4 Implications for syntactic theory . 327 6.5 Future work . 329 A Experimental design ....................................333 A.1 General production task stimuli and conditions . 333 A.1.1 Notes on abbreviations and other conventions . 336 References ...........................................338 viii List of Figures 1.1 The Chukotko-Kamchatkan language family . 19 1.2 Regional dialects of Chukchi (based on Pupynina 2018: 114) . 24 2.1 Linguistic results of language contact (adapted from Thomason and Kaufman 1988, Table 3) . 50 3.1 Production task stimulus . 153 3.2 Production task stimuli with an inanimate agent and animate undergoer . 173 3.3 Production task stimulus with an intransitive and oblique arguments . 176 4.1 Production task stimulus with valency-rearranging applicative morphology . 213 4.2 Stimulus targeting antipassives in valency-alternation production task . 219 4.3 Cline of loss of derivational productivity in valency-changing processes in Modern Chukchi . 251 ix List of Tables 1.1 Study participants by group . 33 2.1 Yupik Village Names Borrowed into Chukchi (Krupnik and Chlenov 2013) . 56 2.2 Examples of Chukchi adverbial particles borrowed into Central Siberian Yupik (Com- rie 1996, Menovsˇcikovˇ 1967) . 58 2.3 Number of Speakers of Siberian Languages (Russian 2010 Census) . 60 2.4 Case marking in Chukchi (adapted from Dunn 1994 & Dunn 1999) . 86 2.5 Absolutive Personal Pronouns in Chukchi (Dunn 1999) . 86 2.6 Agreement affixes in Chukchi transitive aorist and intransitive intentional, with inverse marking highlighted in bold (adapted from Fortescue 1997) . 89 2.7 Case marking in Russian (Wade 1992: 53) . 93 2.8 Agreement affixes in Chukchi transitive aorist and intransitive intentional, with inverse marking highlighted in bold (adapted from Fortescue 1997) . 104 3.1 Select cases in conservative Chukchi, by noun class . 126 3.2 Summary of declension patterns of nouns tested in production task . 128 3.3 Non-future non-progressive transitive agreement in Traditional Chukchi . 140 3.4 Transitive perfect paradigm in traditional Chukchi . 147 3.5 Transitive habitual paradigm in traditional Chukchi . 147 3.6 Non-future neutral (aorist) active paradigm from an attriting speaker . 156 3.7 Non-future neutral (aorist) active inflection in Traditional Chukchi . 156 3.8 Verbal agreement with subject vs. object in languages of the world (Siewierska 2013) . 159 3.9 Habitual inflection provided by a semi-speaker . ..