Published through theRecovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A Native American language formerly spoken in hundreds of communities in the interior of California, Patwin (also known as Wintun Tʼewe) is now spoken by a small but growing number of language revitalizationists and their students. A Grammar of Patwin brings together two hundred years of word lists, notebooks, audio recordings, and manuscripts from archives across the United States and synthesizes this scattered collection into the first published description of the Patwin language. This book shines a light on the knowledge of past speakers and researchers with a clear and well-organized description supported by ample archival evidence. Lewis C. Lawyer addresses the full range of grammatical structure with chapters on phonetics, phonology, nominals, nominal modifiers, spatial terms, verbs, and clauses. At every level of grammatical structure there is notable variation between dialects, and this variation is painstakingly described. An introductory chapter situates the language geographically and historically and also gives a detailed account of previous work on the language and of the archival materials on which the study is based. Throughout the process of writing this book, Lawyer remained in contact with Patwin communities and individuals, who helped to ensure that the content is appropriate from a cultural perspective.

This dissertation is a descriptive grammar of the Patwin language. Patwin is a Native American language native to the southwestern drainage of the Sacramento River in California. It is a member of the Wintuan language family, along with Wintu and Nomlaki. Formerly spoken by a population of about 6,000-30,000 (Kroeber 1932; Cook 1976; Whistler 1976; Golla 2011), there are now only two people known to me who identify as first language speakers of Patwin. Additionally, some individuals are learning the language as adults or in school as part of community-based language revitalization programs (Dubin 2010). Prior to this dissertation, there have been three published articles on aspects of Patwin grammar (Whistler 1981, 1986; Lawyer 2015) and two published stories in Patwin (Whistler 1977a, 1978). A good characterization of Patwin kinship terminology can be found in Whistler's dissertation (Whistler 1980), and Whistler's Master's thesis (1976) contains a thorough characterization of Patwin plant and animal nomenclature. The rest of the record of the Patwin language has been scattered in archives throughout the country. There are extensive collections of archived field notes (Kroeber NB; Merriam NB; Bright NB; Ultan NB; Whistler NB; etc.) and a few important sound recordings (Barrett AU; Bright AU; Swadesh and Melton AU; Ultan AU[b],[a]; Whistler AU). In addition to these primary sources, some drafts of linguistic analyses are available in archives: de Angulo (GR), Radin (GR), Bright (GR), Morgan (1971), and Whistler (MS).This dissertation distills the unruly Patwin archive into a thorough and accurate description of the language, so that scholars in academia and in Native communities can have a detailed, organized, and reliable reference for this language. The description includes each of the areas traditionally described in grammars: phonetics (speech sounds), phonology (sound patterns), morphology (word structure), and syntax (sentence structure). Examples drawn directly from the archival record are used to illustrate every detail, creating a description firmly grounded in real data. To make the dissertation maximally useful as a reference grammar, the prose descriptions are complemented with quick-reference summaries set apart in text boxes. The dissertation also provides a comprehensive catalog of Patwin sources, including discussions of where documentation for each individual dialect of Patwin can be found. Following is a brief synopsis of each chapter of the dissertation, mentioning some of the more salient findings. Chapter 1: Introduction: The language is introduced, including its dialects, geography, and genetic affiliation. Brief biographical sketches are given for each of the speakers whose materials were consulted in the creation of the grammar, noting especially the dialect(s) they spoke. Each researcher whose work was consulted is also briefly discussed, noting especially any idiosyncrasies such as unusual phonetic transcription. Chapter 2: Phonemics and phonetics: The phonemic inventory is introduced, and the phonetic realization of each phonemic category is discussed. Patwin is notable for having 4 laryngeal series of oral stops, differentiated by a combination of voice onset time (aspirated /pÊʻ, tÊʻ, kÊʻ/, voiceless unaspirated /p, t, k/, voiced /b, d/) and airstream initiation (glottalized /pÊơ, tÊơ, kÊơ/ vs. non-glottalized). A mixture of qualitative and quantitative methodology is used in phonetic descriptions. This chapter serves as a demonstration of the level of detail that can be achieved in a phonetic study using exclusively archival materials. Chapter 3: Phonology: Segmental, metrical, and phrasal phonology is discussed here. Here and throughout the dissertation, unexpected irregularities are not glossed over, but are explicitly discussed. For example: Syllable structure is generally CV(C), though a few words (e.g. layuk 'good') have reduced forms with aberrant CVCC syllables (e.g. /layk/). Dialect variation in the realization of stress is also discussed. Chapters 4-6: Nominals and their modifiers: Nominals are inflected for case (subjective, objective, possessive, and a variety of semantic cases) and sometimes number. Modifiers (adjectives, numerals, etc.) are often not adjacent to the head noun, resulting in what could be described as discontinuous constituents. Kinship terms are a special category of nominals, characterized by unique possessive morphology, unique casemarking, and obligatory number marking. There are over 100 definite pronouns, and the paradigm shows an intricate pattern of variation across dialects. Chapter 8: The verb: The verb has complicated morphology, including mutation of the stem itself (stem ablaut and reduplication). Verbs also inflect for tense, aspect, mood, and interrogativity. Verbs may take one or more voice suffixes, such as passive, causative, or reciprocal. Verbs generally do not agree with the subject, but verbs in the hortative mood are an exception. Additionally, certain verb stems reflect the animacy of the object. Chapter 9: The clause: The clause consists of a predicate and its arguments and adjuncts. The predicate is typically a verb, though it may be a nominal. Inflectional information is expressed with suffixes on the verb, or on the auxiliary verb when present. Optional clausal particles also play a role in determining the grammatical mood of the clause (declarative, interrogative, irrealis, or reportative). A sentence may consist of more than one clause, in a clause chaining construction. Negation is expressed with a combination of bound morphology on the verb and often the presence of the negative auxiliary Ê4ele

Nowhere was the linguistic diversity of the New World more extreme than in California, where an extraordinary variety of village-dwelling peoples spoke seventy-eight mutually unintelligible languages. This comprehensive illustrated handbook, a major synthesis of more than 150 years of documentation and study, reviews what we now know about California's indigenous languages. Victor Golla outlines the basic structural features of more than two dozen language types and cites all the major sources, both published and unpublished, for the documentation of these languages—from the earliest vocabularies collected by explorers and missionaries, to the data amassed during the twentieth-century by Alfred Kroeber and his colleagues, to the extraordinary work of John P. Harrington and C. Hart Merriam. Golla also devotes chapters to the role of language in reconstructing prehistory, and to the intertwining of language and culture in pre-contact California societies, making this work, the first of its kind, an essential reference on California’s remarkable Indian languages.

This volume represents a reconstruction of Proto-Wintun, the parent language of a group of California Indian languages. It includes a grammatical sketch of Proto-Wintun, cognate sets with reconstructions and an index to the reconstructions. The book fulfills a need for in-depth reconstructions of proto-languages for California Indian language families, both for theoretical purposes and deeper comparison with other proto- or pre-languages.

This handbook provides broad coverage of the languages indigenous to North America, with special focus on typologically interesting features and areal characteristics, surveys of current work, and topics of particular importance to communities. The volume is divided into two major parts: subfields of linguistics and family sketches. The subfields include those that are customarily addressed in discussions of North American languages (sounds and sound structure, words, sentences), as well as many that have received somewhat less attention until recently (tone, prosody, sociolinguistic variation, directives, information structure, discourse, meaning, language over space and time, conversation structure, evidentiality, pragmatics, verbal art, first and second language acquisition, archives, evolving notions of fieldwork). Family sketches cover major language families and isolates and highlight topics of special value to communities engaged in work on language maintenance, documentation, and revitalization.

This book is the result of over 50 years of research, and it represents an intellectual journey. It is maximally accessible by tabulating the data and inserting frequent cross-references. Dictionary entries are in the alphabetical order of the deepest reconstruction in the set, and there is an English-Utian section at the end of the volume. Yokuts (or Proto Yokuts) is also inserted where there is a resemblance. This strategy is especially helpful for those who wish to use the volume for remote comparison. In this manner, it can serve as a reference book for seminars on non-traditional languages. The volume is also of interest to theoreticians because Utian languages exhibit features that are rare worldwide.

This unique collection of articles in honor of Marianne Mithun represents the very latest in research on language contact and language change in the Indigenous languages of the Americas. The book aims to provide new theoretical and empirical insights into how and why languages change, especially with regard to contact phenomena in languages of North America, Meso-America and South America. The individual chapters cover a broad range of topics, including sound change, morphosyntactic change, lexical semantics, grammaticalization, language endangerment, and discourse-pragmatic change. With chapters from distinguished scholars and talented newcomers alike, this book will be welcomed by anyone with an interest in internally- and externally-motivated language change.