I traveled to Panama this summer in order to study suffix ordering in the Kuna language, a language which I have been studying for many years. Kuna is an indigenous language of the Chibchan family spoken in Panama and Colombia. It is currently a living and viable language, although it is under linguistic pressure from Spanish. In Panama's three autonomous Kuna reservations, Kuna is the dominant language and is still being acquired by children. My research was carried out primarily in Kuna Nega, which is a Kuna community near Cerro Patacón, Panama City's landfill. The community is in the process of language shift from Kuna to Spanish, but the older generations and new arrivals speak Kuna as their preferred language.
My language consultants were primarily middle-aged women born and raised in Kuna Yala, the majority being from the island of San Ignacio de Tupile. My research was carried out using linguistic elicitation, a form of interviewing in which I ask speakers to say specific types of words and sentences in Kuna. The interviews were recorded using a solid-state digital recorder. I also made recordings of spontaneous conversation in the Kuna language, in order to have examples of the constructions in question in a more natural context. Because I am proficient at speaking and understanding Kuna, I was able to conduct some of the elicitation monolingually. I will continue transcribing the recordings during the fall semester in order to gather data for my qualifying paper.
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My host, Elvia Mendez, cooking in her family's kitchen on San Ignacio de Tupile (at home in Kuna Nega she has a gas stove). In Kuna Yala, the traditional dish is Dulemasi, boiled fish and plantains in coconut-milk broth.
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In addition to my fieldwork, I also participated in two workshops on intercultural bilingual education. The first was held in Panama City and was attended by educators and curriculum specialists from all of Panama's indigenous groups. The purpose of the workshop was to allow the Kuna educators, whose bilingual education program is relatively advanced, to share their experiences with others, and also to allow each indigenous group to make a plan for developing a curriculum and implementing it in schools. The basic challenge facing educators is to teach children literacy in their native languages, while also teaching Spanish as a second language.
The second workshop, near the end of my trip, was held in San Ignacio de Tupile, in the Kuna Yala reservation. This workshop was exclusively for educators in the central sector of Kuna Yala who teach first and second grade. The purpose of the workshop was to allow the teachers to share their experiences and to learn more about how to implement bilingual education in their classrooms. This workshop was especially interesting because the discussion was much more practical, and I was able to form a more accurate picture of the realities of teaching in Kuna Yala. In general, teachers are faced with a serious lack of basic supplies and curricular materials, and non-Kuna teachers are also faced with the problem of communicating with Kuna-speaking children. The teachers also discussed more specific issues, such as how to teach the Kuna classificatory number system. Learning about these issues is important to me because it will help me plan how to make the results of my research accessible and useful for teachers as I continue to work on the language in the future.
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View from the church in San Ignacio de Tupile.
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The immediate goal of my research is to write a qualifying paper examining the aspects of suffix ordering that are not accounted for by traditional template models (Sherzer 1989, Newbold 2005). According to Kari (1989), a template model should explain all possible affix orderings by placing suffixes in ordered position classes following the verb root. Suffixes appearing closer to the root are in lower-numbered positions, and suffixes appearing further from the root are in higher-numbered positions. Suffixes that appear together in the same word must be assigned to separate positions. Groups of adjacent positions may form zones which are defined semantically or phonologically. The Kuna verb template as I have constructed it generally conforms to these requirements, having 13 suffix positions divided into two zones. However, some aspects of suffix ordering are not explained by this template. The first of these problems is an ordering loop triggered by the future -oe suffix and the second is the use of the copula as an auxiliary verb. The paper will explore various strategies to account for these phenomena in the context of the apparently templatic behavior of the rest of the suffixes.
The suffix loop interrupts the order of the template in that positions 4,5,6, and 7 can appear in more than one order, including 4-5-6, 5-6-4, and 6-4-5, but not *4-6, *4-7 or *5-4. In other words, the data seem to suggest that we should replace the central section of the linear template model with a circle, something that is unprecedented in template morphology. The loop can be explained to some extent using selectional restrictions. Any word that contains an ungrammatical string is ungrammatical; however, some words composed entirely of grammatical strings are not grammatical. Looping has been studied before in terms of looping between ordered levels of phonology, and has been explained using co-phonologies. We may be able to extend this type of analysis to this case of morphological looping. In the case of Kuna, there are no special phonological rules that characterize the loop. In general, all suffixes exhibit similar phonology, with a few exceptions.
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Going home from Kuna Yala on the new El Llano-Carti road. A car got
stuck at the ford and held us up for several hours
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The copula-auxiliary -gue is interesting because it interrupts the template order, appearing to act as a second root, since it can take position-1 suffixes. However, it can only appear after certain conjunct prefixes marking aspect, and generally cannot appear after disjunct prefixes. If we consider the auxiliary as being in the root position, then we will have to find a way to account for these restrictions. Another complication is that -gue can also be used in order to convert adjectives or defective verbs into verb stems. In this situation, -gue seems to share the root position with another morpheme. The resulting verb "root" can be followed by position-1 prefixes like any other verb root. This suggests that we need a model that can allow various levels of derivation, so that we can have more than one morpheme occupying a template slot. This type of model would also work well to account for reduplication of the progressive suffixes, in which the two reduplicated forms seem to occupy a single slot in the template.
I am currently working on theoretical accounts for these phenomena, and I plan to finish my qualifying paper by the end of this semester. In the future, I plan to continue working with the Kuna language, exploring further descriptive and theoretical questions. I will also continue communicating with Kuna educators, in order to find a concrete way of contributing to the advancement of intercultural bilingual education.
References
Kari, James M. 1989. "Affix positions and zones in the Athapaskan verb complex: Ahtna and Navajo." International Journal of American Linguistics 55:242-54.
Newbold, Lindsey. 2005. Gramática Kuna. Unpublished.
Sherzer, Joel. 1989. “The Kuna verb: A study in the interplay of grammar, discourse, and style,” in: Mary Ritchie Key and Henry Hoenigswald (eds.), General and Amerindian Ethnolinguistics: In Remembrance of Stanley Newman. Berlin: Mouton, 261-272.
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