Date Available

7-21-2015

Year of Publication

2015

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Linguistic Theory and Typology (MALTT)

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

Linguistic Theory & Typology

Advisor

Dr. Edward Barrett

Abstract

Shawnee is a language whose alignment system is of the type first proposed by Nichols (1992) and Siewierska (1998): hierarchical alignment. This alignment system was proposed to account for languages where distinctions between agent (A) and object (O) are not formally manifested. Such is the case in Shawnee; there are person-marking inflections on the verb for both A and O, but there is not set order. Instead, Shawnee makes reference to an animacy hierarchy and is an inverse system. This thesis explores how hierarchical alignment is accounted for by Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), and also applies Paradigm Function Morphology to LFG’s m(orphological)-structure as most of the alignment system in Shawnee is realized in the inflectional morphology.

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