Materials for the Investigation of Quantification in Passamaquoddy

Passamaquoddy is one of four extant Eastern Algonquian languages, together with the closely related Micmac, Abenaki, and Delaware.

Originally spoken along the Atlantic seaboard from the Maritime provinces to the Carolinas, Eastern Algonquian languages like Wampanoag (Massachusett) and Powhatan (in Virginia) were among the first languages encountered by the Europeans. Most of these languages are either lost or have been pushed westward (Delaware- into Oklahoma and Canada).

Passamaquoddy is still spoken in its original home, in the river valleys along the Maine-New Brunswick border. In New Brunswick the language is known as Maliseet (or Malecite); the language is thus often referred to as Passamaquoddy-Maliseet. Fewer than 500 fluent speakers o\f Passamaquoddy-Maliseet are left: roughly 100 in two communities in Maine (Pleasant Point and Indian Township) and 400 or so in several towns in New Brunswick.

The Algonquian language family are of the polysynthetic and nonconfigurational type of language. Polysynthetic languages are characterized by three properties:

1. Extensive use of agglutinative morphology, as well as incorporation, in the construction of complex verbal and nominal stems;
   
2. Similarly extensive use of agreement morphology and accompanying null anaphora;
   
3. Relatively free word order, including the use of discontinuous constituents. The latter two properties characterize so called nonconfigurational languages (Hale 1983).

Languages of this type have provoked extensive debate among linguists, both within and without the generative tradition. On the one hand, these languages do not present the usual kinds of evidence for structure and constituency, so that, in the extreme, linguists have proposed that their sentence structure follows completely different principles from those active in better-studied European languages.

Nevertheless, there is a growing body of research arguing that polysynthetic (and other types of nonconfigurational) languages are really not that different from English. The differences result from (1) differences in morphology, and (2) the availability of fairly unconstrained reordering operations (-scrambling-) that order constituents according to discourse roles and other factors (see Bruening 2001, Legate 2004). The evidence for this comes primarily from quantificational elements, since they, being nonreferential and requiring special syntactic licensing mechanisms, may not undergo these operations as freely as referential NPs (nonreferential NPs, unlike referential NPs, are constrained in the discourse roles they may bear).

In earlier work funded by the NSF (grant number BCS-0081003, represented by Bruening 2001), I argued that the interaction of quantificational NPs revealed a configurational structure underlying the Direct-Inverse alternation in Passamaquoddy. In Direct clauses, the subject appears to be the most prominent argument (in agreement and discourse status), while in the Inverse, the object does.

The project is intended to result in two different types of results:

1. Materials for field linguistics. I anticipate that these will take various forms: a collection of pictures, which can probably be bound into a small book (perhaps a spiral-bound book from which individual pages can be removed as necessary), with accompanying instructions and tips for data collection; several videos, which can be put on a dvd or cd that will accompany the book of illustrations; and possibly other elements as well. All of these will be made available to the linguistics community at large by posting them on the LTRC’s website, where they will part of a larger effort to make tools for all kinds of data elicitation easily available to field researchers.

2. Results for Passamaquoddy. The investigation of quantification and structure in Passamaquoddy is likely to lead to numerous publications. I anticipate that numerous journal articles will be published based on the results of this study, and that the results will be presented at various conferences. There is likely to be enough material for at least one book-length publication as well. Finally, once this project is complete I plan to use the results (and the results of earlier research) to write a purely descriptive grammar of the language as well. I will tailor this to the needs of the Passamaquoddy and Maliseet communities, who will hopefully find it useful in their language revitalization efforts.