Advances in the study of Siouan languages and linguistics

Abstract

Beyond honoring a beloved colleague, our aim in this volume is to bring a variety of issues in Siouan linguistics to the attention of the linguistic community. The Siouan language family is a large and important one, with branches geographically distributed over a broad swath of the North American plains and parts of the southeastern United States. This puts it in contact historically with several other families of languages: Algonquian, Iroquoian, Caddoan, UtoAztecan, and Muskogean. Siouan languages are, or were historically, spoken by the members of at least 25 ethnic/political groups. One Siouan language, Lakota, is among the handful of indigenous North American languages with younger speakers today. Siouan languages have occasionally risen to prominence in general linguistics, for instance in the study of reduplication (Shaw 1980); and Omaha and Crow (Apsaalooke) have lent their names to two of the basic categories of kinship systems in anthropology. Nonetheless, the Siouan family has been underrepresented in the descriptive and typological literature, and most of the languages in the family are severely understudied. The majority of work on Siouan languages is unpublished, existing only in the form of conference papers or manuscripts. 2 This volume is a step toward making information on Siouan languages more broadly available and encouraging deeper investigation of the myriad issues they raise.From the perspective of linguistic typology, Siouan languages have many notable features. Many of these features stand to challenge typological generalizations. Here we briefly sketch a few of the most characteristic features of the Siouan family.1 "Siouan" is not to be confused with "Sioux", a controversial term referring to Lakota and Dakota people, rarely to Nakota/Nakoda people too, but never correctly to people of other traditionally Siouan-language-speaking communities. 2 Many of these unpublished works are collected in the electronic Siouan Archive, maintained by John Boyle at the University of California at Riverside. PrefaceAll Siouan languages possess a rich variety of applicative affixes, confirming Polinsky's (2013) observation that applicatives are common in North America and adding another language family to her list of applicative-rich families in the area. Helmbrecht (2006) divides the applicatives into three templatic slots: locative applicatives, benefactive applicatives, and applicative markers; all of the Siouan languages sampled by Helmbrecht possess at least two applicative morphemes.All Siouan languages are strongly head-final, and the consensus among syntacticians working with Siouan languages is that all but the supraclausal projections (and even some of these) are underlyingly head-final in Siouan languages, contra Kayne's (1994) Antisymmetry theory.All Siouan languages have head-internal relative clauses. A series of strong claims regarding the typological implications of head-internal relative clauses (cf. Cole 1987; Murasugi 2000), including purported distinctions between "Japanesetype" a...