Subject and Word Order in Wappo

Abstract

Our fieldwork on Wappo was conducted under the sponsorship of the Survey of California and other American Indian Languages, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley. We are indebted to Mary Haas and Wallace Chafe for providing us with the support from the Survey and encouraging us to study the structure of Wappo. We are also grateful to John Davis, Aryeh Faltz, Marie-Claude Paris, Edith Moravcsik, Mickey Noonan, and Marc Okrand for reading the first draft of this article (by Li and Thompson) and giving us their invaluable comments and criticisms. In particular, Edith Moravcsik provided us with detailed suggestions and insightful observations which led to much substantial improvement in this article. None of these people, of course, is responsible for the interpretation of their remarks which we have made. Finally, we are most deeply indebted to our informant, Laura Somersal. She has been a tireless, patient, and magnificent teacher to us during all of our field trips to her homeland. The system of transcriptions used in this article is adopted from Jesse Sawyer, EnglishWappo Vocabulary, UCPL, no. 43 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1965). The diacritic mark, comma, on top of a letter denotes glottalization. [h] after a stop indicates aspira-