| In this dissertation, I provide a grammatical description of San Bartolome Zoogocho Zapotec, an endangered Otomanguean language spoken in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. The initial six chapters are concerned with providing a description of the major grammatical features of the language, while the final two examine two major current theoretical issues: parts-of-speech and word order.; The first six chapters provide descriptions of the ethnographic and sociolinguistic situations of the Zoogocho Zapotec community, the sounds of the language, the pronominal system, the morphology, and the syntax of the language. While no particular theoretical framework is used, the inspiration for much of the description comes from the typological universal grammar research program. SBZZ (as I will refer to San Bartolome Zoogocho Zapotec) is a tonal language which can be complex phonologically. It is an agglutinative, slightly fusional language. It is a prototypical VSO language having prepositions, NAdj, NDem, NGen, and NRel orders. Various means of combining clauses exist, including complementation, coordination, and relativization.; Chapter Seven is an examination of the lexical classes present in SBZZ. While I try to define necessary and sufficient conditions for each lexical class, it can be difficult to find conditions which are both necessary and sufficient. I try to rely, therefore, on multiple definitions which, while informed by a variety of cross-linguistic data, are based on and presented by the SBZZ grammar. I devote much of the discussion to the grammaticalization of relational nouns, a topic which has received a great deal of discussion in the literature, both specifically for Zapotecan and Otomanguean languages and more generally. I conclude that relational nouns are a separate category from prepositions and regular nouns in SBZZ, while sharing characteristics with both.; In Chapter Eight, I examine verb initial word order, place SBZZ in two typologies of verb initial languages, and compare a study of word order in two SBZZ texts with other textual studies of word order in verb initial languages. Chapter Eight also confirms a hypothesis about the processing of VSO languages which comes from the processing theory of John A. Hawkins. |
