Peter Sipes Morphology HW 1

Huichol
The previous sections (15) have been dropped to make plagiarizing by students following me too easy. The last section is more of an analytical nature and as such I'm sharing it. If you're truly curious about the other sections drop me a line at my e-mail: pete remove-the-spaces-and-add-the-email-at pluteopleno remove-the-spaces-and-add-a-dot com. 6. How many wordforms do you foresee there being for lexemes like man and child? Based on certain assumptions/observations about lexemes wordforms (tell me what they are), what is a minimum number of wordforms you expect to find in each of these lexemes? If wordforms can be equivalent to sentences in Huichol, does that mean Huichol speakers are lexicalizing sentences? I would expect that Huichol would have no fewer than eighteen (18) wordforms for each lexeme based on the data. We have data for three moods, so to speakcopulative, interrogative and relativebut only data for two grammatical personsfirst and second person singular. It is highly likely that there are also third person as well as a plural forms. If there are three persons over two numbers, that should give us six wordforms per mood. The complication is that all of the data translates into English with our copulabe. It is entirely possible that the -p- morpheme is not a copula, but rather a marker of indicative mood or main clause or factuality or any one of a number of things that is not a copula. But calling it copula suffices for this purpose. In any case, Huichol seems to use one morpheme to indicate one bit of grammatical information, as shown with -p-, -m- and -ti-. Each has a specific role that does not overlap or fuse with the pronomial morphemes but rather behave like pearls on a string. Huichol, based on this very limited data, is an agglutinizing language. It is also highly likely that the morphemes -p-, -m- and -ti- are working at the sentence level and not some sort of case marker for two somewhat related reasons, though the data is limited. First, the sorts of things these morphemes do are not typical of the things that case do in the languages I am familiar witha limited sample. I don't know of a language that uses a case marker to ask questions. On the other hand, these are exactly the sorts of things that go on at the sentence (or CP) level.

Since all of the data represents whole words as a sentence, it is possible that Huichol speakers are lexicalizing to some degree. There are going to be sentences that get repeated with reasonable frequency: an English example would be I don't know. Indeed in-class examples have suggested that polymorphemic words (e.g. Russification) can be lexicalizedand many Huichol word/sentences could fit that mold. On the other hand, there is a potentially infinite number of sentences, including those that have never been heard before, that Huichol speakers could lexicalize. But that seems like an odd situation too, since you can't lexicalize what you've never heard. The truth for Huichol is probably somewhere between non-lexical but easily analyzed words (e.g. Zimbabwification) and the lexicalization of more daily-wear words (e.g. gonna).