Absence of Noun Marking in Alabama

Abstract

I Alabama is a Muskogean language of the Eastern Branch. It is spoken by a number of residents of the Alabama-Coushatta reservation some fifteen miles east of Livingston, Texas. We wish to express here our appreciation to Ms. Cora Sylestine and Ms. Wanda Poncho for sharing their language with us and for their patience in enduring our questions about it. The work reported in this paper, originally presented to the XXIVth Conference on American Indian Languages, has been supported by the Department of Linguistics and Semiotics, Rice University and by a Faculty Research Grant from North Texas State University. Finally, we wish to express our thanks to the reviewers for their comments on the paper; all deficiencies remain ours. We shall use abbreviations as follows: Asp = Aspect; Aug = Augmentative; Aux = Auxiliary; Caus = Causative; Decl = Declarative; Dim = Diminutive; DO = Direct Object; DP = Distant Past; Evid = Evidential; For = Foreign; Fut = Future; IndPro = Indefinite Pronoun; Inst = Instrument; Neg = Negative; Nom = Nominative; Obj = Object; Obl = Oblique; P1 = Plural; Prox = Proximal; Q = Question; Refl = Reflexive; Recip = Reciprocal; Sem = Semifactitive; Sg = Singular; Subj = Subject; Subjn = Subjunctive; Top = Topic. The symbols used in transcribing Alabama are those used in an orthography created by Heather K. Hardy and Cora Sylestine (ms.) for use by the speakers of the language, and with the exception of orthographic ch to represent /c/, they take their normal phonetic values.