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The Lower Mississippi Valley as a Language Area
Kaufman, David Vincent
Kaufman, David Vincent
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Abstract
It has been hypothesized that the Southeastern U.S. is a language area, or Sprachbund. However, there has been little systematic examination of the supposed features of this area. The current analysis focuses on a smaller portion of the Southeast, specifically, the Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV), and provides a systematic analysis, including the eight languages that occur in what I define as the LMV: Atakapa, Biloxi, Chitimacha, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Mobilian Trade Language (MTL), Natchez, Ofo, and Tunica. This study examines phonetic, phonological, and morphological features and ranks them according to universality and geographic extent, and lexical and semantic borrowings to assess the degree of linguistic and cultural contact. The results show that: (1) the LMV is a Sprachbund on par with other well known Sprachbünde of the world such as the Balkans and South Asia; (2) there are possibly three different overlapping Sprachbünde spanning the northern Gulf from northeastern Mexico to the Atlantic seaboard; (3) Totonac, a Mesoamerican language, shares several features with the LMV and scores higher than several languages geographically closer to the LMV; (4) grammatical features, such as positional verb auxiliaries, form a major component of the LMV Sprachbund; (5) discursive and pragmatic features, such as focus- and topic-marking, which have been little studied in analyses of Sprachbünde, play a major role in the LMV Sprachbund; and (6) several calques and lexical borrowings, which includes exchanges of "basic" vocabulary, suggest intense contact and intercommunication within the area.
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Date
2014-08-31
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University of Kansas
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This item contains archived web content.
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Keywords
Linguistics, cultural contact, History, Language contact, Mississippi Valley, Native American, Sprachbund