Please join us for a meeting of the Language Variation & Change workshop, this Friday, April 12 at 3:30pm, in Rosenwald 301.

Number, animacy, and inalienability in Hopi possessive constructions
Hannah McElgunn, UChicago

This talk is a first attempt to understand the interaction between number and animacy in Hopi possessive constructions in relation to Smith-Stark’s (1974) plurality split. According to the Hopi Dictionary, which documents the Third Mesa dialect, inanimate nouns are not marked for number, while animate nouns are. But number marking on possessed animate nouns appears to depend on their inalienability from the speaker. So, domestic animals tend to be marked for singular, dual, and plural, but kin relations tend to be marked only for singular or non-singular. I write “tend to”, because the neat picture in the dictionary is complicated by speakers of three other Hopi dialects. Although in some cases the speakers I have worked with appear to contradict the dictionary, the number marking they express on animate nouns is predictable from the way they mark inanimate nouns.