The Verb System of Tetsot'ine Yatie: Lutselk'e, Dettah, and Ndilo Dialects

FAIN: FN-249645-16

Alessandro Jaker
Unaffiliated Independent Scholar (Watertown, SD 57201-3633)

Fieldwork and research to produce a verb grammar of the endangered Yellowknife dialect, a Northern Athabaskan language variety, spoken in northwestern Canada.

This project proposes to write a verb grammar of Tetso’t’iné Yatié or Yellowknife (Ethnologue code: chp), a dialect of Dëne Suliné (Chipewyan) previously claimed to have gone extinct in 1928. The project builds on the author’s previous work with the Yellowknives Dene, funded by NSF-1204171 under the Polar Postdoctoral Program from 2013-15 (Phonetics and Phonology of Two Northern Athabaskan Languages). The verb grammar will be loosely modeled on Keren Rice’s 1989 A Grammar of Slave, and will exhaustively catalogue the phonological behavior of every conjugation marker in every mode and classifier and in every position, as well as cataloguing every possible verb theme category and derivational string. Keren Rice has agreed to be involved in this project to ensure accuracy and comprehensiveness of the data, from an Athapaskanist perspective. The finished products will be a print version of the verb grammar, to be published through Alaska Native Language Center Publications, and an electronic version with clickable text and sound files.

Associated Products

Level Ordering and Opacity in Tetsot'ine (Yellowknife): a Stratal OT Account (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Level Ordering and Opacity in Tetsot'ine (Yellowknife): a Stratal OT Account
Author: Alessandro Jaker
Author: Paul Kiparsky
Abstract: This presentation provides evidence for Level Ordering in Tetso?´t'ine´, using evidence from three dimensions of phonological variation across levels: tone association, foot-medial consonant deletion, and stress-tone interactions. This work shows that morphologically complex languages can have more levels than are usually assumed, which actually confirms the key idea behind Stratal OT--that levels are motivated by both phonology and morphology. We conclude that Stratal OT provides both a principled account of phonological opacity, as well as a restrictive theory of the phonology-morphology interface.
Date: 01/05/2018
Conference Name: Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Annual Meeting, 2018

Systematic Underspecification and Derived Environment Effects in Tetsot'ine (Yellowknife) (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Systematic Underspecification and Derived Environment Effects in Tetsot'ine (Yellowknife)
Author: Alessandro Jaker
Abstract: This poster investigates vowel length in Tetsot'ine. It is argued that stem vowels are specified underlyingly as having either one or two moras (as part of the full ~ reduced vowel contrast, inherited from Proto-Dene), while prefix vowels have zero moras--that is, they do not contrast in length. This hypothesis is called "Systematic Underspecification". When combined with level ordering, this hypothesis explains nearly all of the observed vowel length alternations in prefixes. Specifically, long vowels in prefixes take at least two cycles to derive: a vowel acquires a mora on the first cycle, and then a consequent subsequently deletes on a later cycle, leaving behind a long vowel. On the other hand, if a vowel coalesces with another vowel immediately on the same cycle at which it is added, a short vowel will result, since the new vowel had zero moras in the input, and thus does not add any new vowel length.
Date: 01/06/2018

Tetsǫ́t'ıné Verb Grammar (Book)
Title: Tetsǫ́t'ıné Verb Grammar
Author: Emerence Cardinal
Author: Alessandro Jaker
Editor: Leon Unruh
Abstract: This book provides an overview of the verb system of Tetsǫ́t'ıné Yatıé, the dialect of Dëne Sųłıné indigenous to the area north of Great Slave Lake, in Canada's Northwest Territories. This book covers all aspects of Tetsǫ́t'ıné verb morphology and phonology, including the sound system, inflectional categories, template positions, conjugation patterns, derivational strings, and verb theme categories. The book also provides some historical and cultural background on the Tetsǫ́t'ıné people, and notes typological and areal similarities with neighboring languages, including Tłıchǫ and North Slavey.
Year: 2020
Access Model: book available for purchase
Publisher: Alaska Native Language Center Publications
Type: Multi-author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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