Abstract

Jicarilla Apache is a Southern Athabaskan language with a complex verbal structure, including a prefix template with positions for more than ten affixes. Little has been done to document or describe the language grammatically or typologically, but one of the morphemes that has been described in the literature is the suffix -go. The morpheme can be found in elicited speech as well as in narrations. This morpheme is one of the few verbal affixes that can appear after the verb stem and plays a role in many subordinate clause constructions. It has been described as a temporal marker, a feature of certain auxiliary verb constructions, a marker of habitual aspect, and a required part of causative constructions, among others. Such a wide variety of uses can make it difficult for language learners to know when this morpheme should be included. But there is one function that would account for all the previous descriptions and provide a simpler paradigm for funderstanding what triggers the presence of -go: namely, that of reference tracking. No referent tracking function of -go has been described, yet many of the functions of -go provided in the literature can also be explained as the result of a system of reference tracking. This thesis argues that Jicarilla features a reference tracking system that combines foregrounding functions with the features of switch reference, according to the definition of foregrounding found in Simpson (2004) and the definitions of switch reference found in van Gijn (2016a) and Stirling (1993). This is demonstrated by reviewing all the examples of -go in the available literature, including Goddard (1911), Jung (2002), and Phone, Olson, Martinez, & Axelrod (2007).

Degree

College and Department

Humanities; Linguistics

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