Alternating Roots in Lummi

Abstract

The relationship between meaning and phonetic form in natural language is a complicated one. For the linguist doing fieldwork on an unwritten language, arriving at a sufficiently precise translation of even simple phrases is often a difficult task. Occasionally, the same grammatical feature or category (such as tense, aspect, person, number, case, etc.) will be represented by different phonetic sequences (allomorphy). The linguist is thus faced with the double problem of deciding whether different appearing forms are manifestations of the same grammatical feature and whether similar appearing forms might represent different grammatical features. It is not enough, of course, to rely totally on translated meanings since differences can be obscured quite easily by inadequate translations. We must, rather, look at glosses as but one piece of evidence in our analysis. It is the contention of this article that the determination of the phonological rules in a grammar (in the generative framework) can be a great help in determining more precisely the form and nature of the grammatical features and categories of a particular language. An excellent case demonstrating how phonological considerations elucidate grammatical features can be found in Lummi, a (Straits) Salish language formerly spoken along northern Puget Sound around Bellingham Bay in northwestern Washington State.2