A feature common to many native languages of North America is the use of single words to convey meanings that in languages like English would require a multi-word sentence. These words generally have a rich internal structure, where prefixes and suffixes attach to a core, often a verb, and contribute specific pieces of meaning to the meaning of the overall word. This doctoral dissertation research project focuses on the meanings that are carried by the pieces of complex verbs in Nez Perce, a highly endangered language spoken in Idaho, Washington and Oregon. The pieces that are of special interest form a system of suffixes encoding distinctions of modality, i.e. whether the state of affairs described by the sentence is a possibility, a necessity, or something that transpires in the actual world. This system also includes marking for tense, the location of an event in time, as well as marking for the spatial location of events in what looks to be a rare system of "spatial tenses". The goal of this project is to understand the individual meanings of these suffixes and the ways that they combine to produce more elaborate meanings for complex words and ultimately for entire sentences, utterances and discourses.
Data for this study will be collected by Amy Rose Deal in collaboration with Nez Perce speakers. Since the suffixes of interest are not independent words, their semantics can only be studied deductively, by examining the meanings of a variety of complex verbs which include the suffixes in question and abstracting out shared meanings for the shared parts. This task is made possible by the input of native speakers, who provide judgments of the truth and appropriateness of utterances in different contexts. In drawing out some of the nuances of meaning in Nez Perce, this project will preserve the semantic knowledge of present speakers for future generations of Nez Perce tribal members.
