Please join us in Cobb Hall 202 on Friday, January 19 at 3:30 PM for the next LVC meeting of the quarter. Corinne Kasper will be talking about the verbal paradigms that L2 Potawatomi speakers use in conversational settings.

Verbal Orders in L2 Potawatomi Discourse

Potawatomi is an endangered Algonquian language spoken around the Great Lakes. With fewer than a dozen fluent first language speakers, whose numbers were approximately halved during the current Covid-19 pandemic (Lewis under review). To date, the majority of Potawatomi research includes data from L1 speakers only with analyses describing the grammar, determining the distribution of particular Algonquian grammatical features, and the discourse marker system of the language (Hockett 1939, Buszard-Welcher 2003, Lockwood 2017, Lewis 2020). In contrast, the data discussed here comes from devoted groups of second language learners spread across the Potawatomi communities in the United States and Canada. Though the structure of Potawatomi is changing as a result of language contact and endangerment, this talk focuses specifically on the verbal paradigms that L2 speakers employ in conversational settings, as L2 Potawatomi is the most commonly spoken variety with the highest number of speakers. In particular, I describe the distribution and potentially shifting discourse functions of two verbal agreement types, known as the independent and conjunct in Algonqiuanist literature. Namely, I describe the prevalence and discourse functions of independent order verbs in L2 conversations and seemingly rigid formations of the conjunct in embedded clause structures.