{"id":1341,"date":"2011-01-25T10:00:02","date_gmt":"2011-01-25T08:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1341"},"modified":"2011-01-24T12:17:17","modified_gmt":"2011-01-24T10:17:17","slug":"1341","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1341","title":{"rendered":"A grammatical study of Innu-aimun particles"},"content":{"rendered":"
A grammatical study of Innu-aimun particles<\/strong>. By Will Oxford<\/strong>. (Algonquian and Iroquoian linguistics memoir 20.) Winnipeg, Manitoba: Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics, 2008. Pp. xii, 301. ISBN 9780921064206<\/a>. $40.<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Michael W. Morgan<\/strong><\/a>, Addis Ababa University<\/em><\/p>\n

Numerous Algonquian languages are still spoken across northern North America, and as a group they present a typological profile significantly different from other language families. Famous for verb transitivity classes, animacy distinctions in declension, and obviation, as well as their non-configurational and polysynthetic structure, they have traditionally been described as having three parts of speech: nouns (including pronouns and demonstratives), verbs, and particles, a loose class of indeclinables. Innu-aimun, also known as Montagnais and Naskapi, is a typical Algonquian language spoken in Labrador and Quebec. In the present work, Will Oxford presents and analyzes data on Innu-aimun particles, based mostly on the Eastern Montagnais dialect of Sheshatshiu, Labrador, but with occasional reference to other dialects and to varieties of Cree.<\/p>\n

In Ch. 1, \u2018Introduction\u2019, O gives an introduction to the affiliation of Innu-aimun within Algonquian, an overview of its salient typological features, and the sources of his data. Ch. 2, \u2018A Classification of Innu-aimun particles\u2019, presents the classificatory scheme of particles that is followed throughout the book (including a discussion of several items whose status is uncertain). Two categories of declinable words, pronouns\/demonstratives and clefting words, share some properties with particles, and are discussed separately in Ch. 3 and Ch. 4, respectively.<\/p>\n

Innu-aimun particles per se are categorized as adnominal particles (Ch. 5), prepositions (Ch. 6), adverbs (Ch. 7), and minor categories (Ch. 8). Adnominal particles include a very limited set of adjectives (a class normally said to be non-existent in Algonquian languages), as well as three types of quantifiers: numeral quantifiers, non-numeral quantifiers, and the numerous and interesting group of incorporated-noun quantifiers (similar in many ways to East Asian classifiers). Prepositions also fall into three classes (locative prepositions, incorporated-noun prepositions, and functional prepositions). They are basically locatives, but unlike normal noun locatives, they can take a nominal object.<\/p>\n

Adverbs in Innu-aimun are classified semantically as follows: circumstantial (manner, spatial, temporal, and spatial\/temporal), degree (amplifying and attenuating), and modal (epistemic, evidential, evaluative, and volitional). The presentation of Innu-aimun particles ends with a number of distinct classes not covered in the preceding chapters: focus particles, question particles, negators, conjunctions, and interjections. While each of these classes is minor in size, they are of great interest for Innu-aimun syntax.<\/p>\n

Ch. 9 summarizes grammatical patterns recurring throughout the book and presents O\u2019s conclusions. In addition to the standard bibliography and index, O includes an appendix containing a glossary of over 500 Innu-aimun particles and function words to illustrate how the classification scheme of the present book can be applied to the LabLex dictionary database.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A grammatical study of Innu-aimun particles. By Will Oxford. (Algonquian and Iroquoian linguistics memoir 20.) Winnipeg, Manitoba: Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics, 2008. Pp. xii, 301. ISBN 9780921064206. $40. Reviewed by Michael W. Morgan, Addis Ababa University Numerous Algonquian languages are still spoken across northern North America, and as a group they present a typological profile […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1341"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1343,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341\/revisions\/1343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}