Lecture: Challenging the Deep French Hypothesis

Level-ordering effects on hiatus resolution in Michif morphophonology

Michif is a mixed language spoken by the Métis people of the Canadian Prairies. It is unique in that it features a (mostly) stratified vocabulary consisting of Plains Cree verbs and Métis French nouns. This lexical stratification some argue is evidence of a split grammar as well, including phonology and morphology, which I call the Deep French Hypothesis (DFH). Work on the phonetics of Michif however allows for a unified Optimality Theoretic modelling of the phonology-morphology interface that challenges the DFH, which I will present in this talk.

Michif is a mixed language spoken by the Métis people of the Canadian Prairies. It is unique in that it features a (mostly) stratified vocabulary consisting of Plains Cree verbs and Métis French nouns. This lexical stratification some argue is evidence of a split grammar as well, including phonology and morphology, which I call the Deep French Hypothesis (DFH). Work on the phonetics of Michif by Nicole Rosen, notably her 2007 Ph.D. thesis, however showed that the phonetics of the Cree and French components of the lexicon are not exclusive and seem to be synchronically unified.
Working from this unified inventory and her descriptions of Michif phonology I present a traditional Stratal OT analysis of Michif morphophonology that, given some preliminary assumptions, can account for both verb and noun inflection with the same constraint rankings.
I will also briefly discuss apparent process ordering paradoxes in Michif preverbs that place it within the wider discourse of verbal inflection in Cree–Montagnais–Naskapi languages.

Info

Day: 2024-05-11
Start time: 09:30
Duration: 00:30
Room: Fish (33.1.010)
Track: Theoretical Linguistics
Language: en

Links:

Feedback

Click here to let us know how you liked this event.

Concurrent Events