Abstract
Categories covering the expression of grammatical information such as aspect, negation, tense, mood, modality, etc., are crucial to the study of language universals. In this study, I will present an analysis of the syntax and semantics of these grammatical categories in Lakota within the Role and Reference Grammar framework (hereafter RRG) (Van Valin 1993, 2005; Van Valin and LaPolla 1997), a functional approach in which elements with a purely grammatical function are treated as ´operators`. Many languages mark Aspect-Tense- Mood/Modality information (henceforth ATM) either morphologically or syntactically. Unlike most Native American languages, which exhibit an extremely complex verbal morphological system indicating this grammatical information, Lakota, a Siouan language with a mildly synthetic / partially agglutinative morphology, expresses information relating to ATM through enclitics, auxiliary verbs and adverbs, rather than by coding it through verbal affixes.
Highlights
The organisation of this paper is as follows: after a brief account of the most relevant morphosyntactic features exhibited by Lakota, Section 2 attempts to shed light on the distinction between lexical words, enclitics and affixes through evidence obtained in the study of this language
After a description of each grammatical category, an analysis of the linear order exhibited by the Lakota operators with respect to the nucleus of the clause are analysed in Section 4, showing that this ordering reflects the scope relations between the grammatical categories conveyed by these operators
The findings obtained in the analysis of the linear ordering exhibited by the Lakota operators appear to validate RRGs principle of linearity, since it conforms to the sequence nucleus > nuclear operators > core operators > clausal operators, in which operator ordering correlates with scope
Summary
The organisation of this paper is as follows: after a brief account of the most relevant morphosyntactic features exhibited by Lakota, Section 2 attempts to shed light on the distinction between lexical words, enclitics and affixes through evidence obtained in the study of this language. After a description of each grammatical category, an analysis of the linear order exhibited by the Lakota operators with respect to the nucleus of the clause are analysed, showing that this ordering reflects the scope relations between the grammatical categories conveyed by these operators. A summary of the most relevant findings obtained in this research concludes this paper
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