A Grammar of Crow

Description

= Apsáalooke Alilláau. — Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. — XXIV, 448 p.This grammar is a revision and enlargement of my doctoral dissertation. “Incorporation and cliticization in Crow morphosyntax” (1991). That work was written in the framework of autolexical syntax, a theory pioneered by Jerrold Sadock. This theory views a grammar as a set of modules — minimally, phonology, morphology, and syntax — conceived not hierarchically, so that the output of one level provides the input for another, but rather as coexisting on the same level, so that the requirements of each module are satisfied simultaneously, the different components being related to each other by means of an interface. In other words, an expression of the language must be simultaneously well-formed in each of the modules in order to qualify as grammatical. One of the claims of this approach is that morphological elements of words may function directly in the syntax, a not unreasonable claim for a highly polysynthetic language like Crow, and one that I attempt to provide evidence for. In particular, I claim that the bound pronominals are syntactic constituents rather than agreement markers, and that noun, verb, and postposition incorporation are also syntactic processes.While my thinking about grammar has been informed and influenced by the autolexical approach, my goal is to write a grammar that is primarily descriptive, one which will be useful to the linguistic community and to the Crow people as a summary of what is known at this point about the structure of the language. Hopefully this grammar will provide material and direction for future researchers.