Defining the Word in Cayuga (Iroquoian)

The Cayuga (Northern Iroquoian) word has been identified as a domain (one relevant for pitch accent assignment [Chafe 1977:169]). The goal of this paper is to determine which linguistic constituent corresponds to the Cayuga word domain. This paper presents evidence that the Cayuga word domain does not correspond to the grammatical word, nor to the prosodic word; instead, it is coextensive with the Phonological Phrase domain. Several characteristics of words in polysynthetic languages fall out from this analysis.

[1]  Noam Chomsky.  Some notes on economy of derivation and representation , 2013 .

[2]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  The Sound Pattern of English , 1968 .

[3]  M. Mithun.  Investigating obsolescence: The incipient obsolescence of polysynthesis: Cayuga in Ontario and Oklahoma , 1989 .

[4]  Michael Kenstowicz,et al.  Phonology In Generative Grammar , 1994 .

[5]  Laura J. Downing,et al.  Prosodic Stem ≠ Prosodic Word in Bantu , 1999 .

[6]  Jean-Yves Pollock.  Verb movement, universal grammar and the structure of IP , 1989 .

[7]  G. Clements.  Papers in Laboratory Phonology: The role of the sonority cycle in core syllabification , 1990 .

[8]  Michael K. Foster.  Alternating Weak and Strong Syllables in Cayuga Words , 1982, International Journal of American Linguistics.

[9]  James W. Harris,et al.  Syllable Structure and Stress in Spanish: A Nonlinear Analysis , 1982 .

[10]  John J. McCarthy,et al.  The Prosody Of Phase In Rotuman , 2000 .

[11]  Elisabeth Selkirk,et al.  Phonology and Syntax: The Relation between Sound and Structure , 1984 .

[12]  Koch Sigmund Ed,et al.  Psychology: A Study of A Science , 1962 .

[13]  Geert Booij,et al.  The role of the prosodic word in phonotactic generalizations , 1999 .

[14]  B. Hayes.  Metrical Stress Theory: Principles and Case Studies , 1995 .

[15]  Michael K. Foster.  From the Earth to Beyond the Sky: An Ethnographic Approach to Four Longhouse Iroquois Speech Events , 1974 .

[16]  Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins,et al.  The morphological and phonological constituent structure of words in Moses-Columbia Salish (Nxa?amxcín) , 1998 .

[17]  Scott Soames,et al.  Linguistics and psychology , 1984 .

[18]  R. Kager.  Alternatives to the iambic-trochaic law , 1993 .

[19]  Karin Eva Michelson.  A comparative study of accent in the five nations Iroquoian languages : a thesis , 1983 .

[20]  Carrie Dyck,et al.  English-Cayuga/Cayuga-English Dictionary , 2002 .

[21]  Sharon Peperkamp,et al.  On the prosodic representation of clitics , 1996 .

[22]  Nancy C. Dorian,et al.  Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Contraction and Death , 1990 .

[23]  T. Alan Hall,et al.  Studies on the phonological word , 1999 .