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Willard Marriott Digital Library FUNCTIONAL MORPHOLOGY IN NAHUATL LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION by Steven Jeffrey Pynes, Jr. A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Linguistics The University of Utah December 2017 Copyright © Steven Jeffrey Pynes, Jr. 2017 All Rights Reserved The University of Utah Graduate School STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Steven Jeffrey Pynes, Jr. has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: MaryAnn Christison , Chair 06/07/2017 Date Approved Lyle Campbell , Member 06/07/2017 Date Approved Adrian Palmer , Member 06/07/2017 Date Approved Johanna Watzinger-Tharp , Member 06/07/2017 Date Approved Fernando Rubio , Member 06/07/2017 Date Approved and by Patricia Hanna , Chair/Dean of the Department of Linguistics and by David B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT The Nahuatl language of Mexico, like many other indigenous and minority languages, faces language shift in the face of globalization. The particular historical role of Nahuatl as the language of the Aztec Triple Alliance and as a Mesoamerican lingua franca in the late pre-Columbian and early colonial periods has left an unusually rich documentary history and attracted academic interest. Based on data drawn from the historical record along with observation and fieldwork performed while learning and later teaching Nahuatl, I demonstrate that the relatively common Nahuatl verbal morpheme -ti-, frequently labeled as a “ligature” or “connector” in the existing literature, acts as a meaningful functional morpheme in contemporary Eastern Huastecan Nahuatl that serves to index spatial information associated with the predicate. I then consider the ways in which spatial indexing in general is approached by native speaker instructors of Nahuatl as they teach speakers of Indo-European languages, which generally lack comparable structures. From this discussion, I draw suggestions for linguists and languages communities engaged in documentation and language revitalization. Dedicated to my teachers, colleagues, and friends at the Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................ vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................... viii Chapters 1 INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND .................................................................... 1 1.1 The Goals of This Research ................................................................................. 1 1.2 Language Endangerment ..................................................................................... 2 1.3 Language Revitalization ...................................................................................... 4 1.4 Challenges in Language Revitalization ............................................................... 5 1.5 Researcher Experience, Background, and Qualifications .................................... 7 1.6 Personal Background ........................................................................................... 9 1.7 On Nahuatl Orthographic Representation .......................................................... 14 1.8 Some Functional Morphemes in Nahuatl .......................................................... 15 1.9 Research Questions ............................................................................................ 23 1.10 The Structure of the Dissertation Research ..................................................... 24 2 LITERATURE REVIEW .............................................................................................. 26 2.1 Context ............................................................................................................... 26 2.2 The Acquisition of Functional Morphology in L1 and L2 ................................ 32 2.3 Space in Language ............................................................................................. 36 2.4 Nahuatl ............................................................................................................... 42 2.5 Documentary Linguistics and Fieldwork ........................................................... 51 2.6 Formal Linguistics and Fieldwork ..................................................................... 53 2.7 Fieldwork Approach for This Study .................................................................. 53 3 METHODOLOGY ........................................................................................................ 55 3.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 55 3.2 Research Design................................................................................................. 55 3.3 Teacher Participants ........................................................................................... 57 3.4 Modes of Data Collection .................................................................................. 60 3.5 Data Analysis ..................................................................................................... 63 4 DATA AND ANALYSIS .............................................................................................. 65 4.1 Relational Nouns, the Nahuatl THING/PLACE Distinction, and Locative Constructions in Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl ............................................................. 66 4.2 Directionals: On- and Hual- ............................................................................... 86 4.3 Purposives .......................................................................................................... 90 4.4 The -ti- Ligature in Verbal Constructions .......................................................... 92 5 DISCUSSION OF IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSION ...................................... 116 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................... 130 vi LIST OF TABLES Tables 1.1: Orthographic Key ...................................................................................................... 16 2.1: Deixis by Vowel Quality ........................................................................................... 27 2.2: “Secondary Auxiliary Verbs” and Nahuatl -ti- Ligature Complements .................... 29 4.1: Conversion of PLACE Nominals into THING Nominals ......................................... 80 4.2: Locative Verbs and Corresponding Nominals ........................................................... 82 4.3: Purposive Suffixes ..................................................................................................... 91 4.4: Auxiliary Verbs.......................................................................................................... 96 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I thank my family, principally my wife, Karen, and our children, for their patience and encouragement. I owe to them, as to many other relatives and friends, a great debt of gratitude for their support through so many years. I also wish to thank my many friends and teachers at the Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, whose enthusiasm, patience, and creativity have served as both motivation and inspiration for this study, particularly Abelardo de la Cruz de la Cruz, Eduardo de la Cruz Cruz, Catalina Cruz de la Cruz, Bladin Gerardo, Alberta Martinez Cruz, Rosy de la Cruz Cruz, and John Sullivan. Without the unflagging patience, foresight, and guidance of the members of my supervisory committee, MaryAnn Christison, Adrian Palmer, Lyle Campbell, Fernando Rubio, and Johanna Watzinger-Tharp, I would not have arrived at this point. Many other faculty, staff, and fellow students at the University of Utah have also helped me immeasurably, particularly those members of the Center for Latin American Studies and the Department of World Languages and Cultures who have been involved in organizing and supporting instruction in less-taught languages. Likewise, my fellow learners of Nahuatl and, more recently, my Nahuatl language students have my thanks. It is clear to me that any list I offer here is necessarily incomplete; I cannot possibly mention by name all of the many people who have contributed to my effort through their patience, support, friendship, comments, suggestions, and questions. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND 1.1 The Goals of This Research The purpose of this dissertation research is to expand meaning-related aspects of the existing documentation of a particular morphological structure: the Nahuatl verbal -ti- ligature. While this clarification may benefit linguists working in formal or typological research, my primary purpose in conducting this research is to inform language revitalization by explicitly creating a source of information about a language structure that will aid in the teaching of Nahuatl learners as the structure poses difficulties for first language (L1) speakers of Spanish and English. Nahuatl in general is quite well documented, and the morphemes in question occur frequently.