Preface

Abstract

Extract This work represents the result of a ten-year process where a number of threads in several different areas eventually spun into one. Along the way, I’ve had the benefit of advice, insights, critiques, and encouragement from many colleagues, acquaintances, and friends, who I would like to recognize here. My largest debt in the work presented here is to my colleague, friend, and erstwhile research partner Marguerite MacKenzie. Much of what I understand about Algonquian languages, and about Innu-aimûn, in particular, comes from her patient guidance and from her walking me through the intricacies of an endless stream of examples. Originally, this work was to be a joint endeavor, but then the internal logic of the analysis pushed it away from a study of Innu-aimûn alone and towards a more theoretically focused, comparative, generative study, so it ended up in my hands. But Marguerite still deserves a mountain of credit for anything that is sensible in the presentation of the Innu-aimûn data here, and all my gratitude for her mentorship and practical help over a lengthy span of years in which we worked together on these sorts of things.