Open Collections

Douglas Lake Okanagan : phonology and morphology

University of British Columbia

This thesis describes aspects of the grammatical structure of Douglas Lake Okanagan, an Indian language spoken in British Columbia, Canada. It is in three parts: phonology, morphophonemics and morphology. The field research on which this study is based was conducted on the Quilchena Reserve near Merritt, B.C. during the summer of 1977. There are thirty-seven consonants defined by three manners: stop, spirant and resonant; and six points of articulation: labial, apical, lateral, velar, post velar and glottal. A contrast of glottalized and unglottalized occurs in the stop and resonant series and a contrast of labialized and unlabialized in the velar and post velar positions. In general, each series shows a full set of oppositions except there is no plain lateral stop in the stop series, no labial spirant in the spirant series and no labialized post velars in the resonant series. The vowels are _i, a and u. Morphophonemic changes involve consonants, vowels, syllables and stress. They include processes of assimilation, dissimilation, fusion, loss, epenthesis, metathesis and stress shift. The morphology deals with the structure of words. Words can be simple roots or roots extended by affixes to form stems. Stems may be classified as transitive or intransitive on the basis of accompanying affixes. Transitive suffixes mark stems which express the action of a subject on an object. Intransitive suffixes mark stems which express an activity or state of a subject with no reference to an object. Affixes also express four aspects: unrealized, continuative, customary and inchoative. Other prefixes are directional, locational, nominal, possessive and agentive. Other suffixes are instrumental and lexical. Reduplicated stems express iteration, plurality, dirninuitivity and intensity. Two roots can be linked to form a compound stem.

Text

2010-02-26

For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/21059

Linguistics

University of British Columbia

Graduate