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Focus and Constituent Order in Haida

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Elizabeth A. Edwards
Elizabeth A. Edwards*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Extract

Haida is a linguistic isolate spoken on Prince of Wales Island in south-east Alaska and on the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia. Swanton (1911:267) asserts there is one basic order for Haida sentences having noun constituents (Subject-Object-Verb) and another for sentences with pronoun constituents (Object-Subject-Verb). When nouns and pronouns both occur, it is the noun that precedes, regardless of whether it is the syntactic Subject or Object. Eastman claims there is “no one basic order typology in terms of the order of meaningful elements in sentences, although both an SOV and OSV order are common” (1979:148). Edwards (1978:7) suggests that “in Haida linear ordering with respect to Subject is less important than the classification of the element as noun or pronoun and its communicative importance.” In this paper, constituent order will be seen to be a determinant of information focus in Haida utterances from the point of view of the analyst.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , Fall 1983 , pp. 149 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1983

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References

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