| This is a study of the interplay of semantics, syntax, and pragmatics in Cherokee grammar. Verbs in Cherokee, an Iroquoian language, take pronominal prefixes which index the person, number, and gender of their arguments. The pronominal prefix system, which might be considered active/stative or split-ergative, reflects the semantic role, syntactic relation, and discourse-pragmatic status associated with each verbal argument. The grammatical analysis is a contribution to Iroquoian linguistics, and has consequences for morphological theory as well as for typological studies of morphology and syntax.; The dissertation begins with an introduction to Cherokee linguistics (Chapter One), followed by a detailed morphological and phonological description of the pronominal prefix system (Chapter Two).; Chapter Three shows that semantics, syntax, and pragmatics must all be brought to bear on the choice of pronominal prefixes. Special emphasis is placed on the factors which condition the alternation between active and inverse clauses, and on the different ways in which the pragmatic statuses of noun phrase referents affect sentence structure.; Chapter Four presents a formal analysis of the pronominal prefix system within the Extended Word and Paradigm framework, developed by Stephen Anderson. A set of morphological rules and rich lexical entries account for the various grammatical patterns discussed in Chapter Two and Three.; Pronominal prefixes appear on adjectives and nouns as well as on verbs; in Chapter Five, lexical semantic factors are shown to play a limited role in the pronominal prefix system for all parts of speech.; Chapter Six covers several theoretical and typological issues. Cherokee is presented as a splitergative language which in unusually complex in that the split is governed by three different variables; the analysis of the inverse construction presented in Chapters Three and Four is given further support; and Cherokee is shown to be a fairly typical "pronominal argument" or "head-marking" language. |
