This article considers certain differences between subjects and objects in English that are not found in Mohawk, a nonconfigurational language with extensive agreement morphology. In particular, disjoint reference effects, island conditions, and weak crossover phenomena are investigated in some detail. Facts from these domains motivate a theory of Mohawk clause structure in which most NPs are generated in adjunct positions, along the lines proposed by Jelinek (1984) and others. Clausal arguments, however, do show standard subject-object asymmetries, unlike NPs. This motivates a Case-driven theory of nonconfigurationality, and shows that it is correct to attribute configurational representations to Mohawk after all.
The data presented in this article is a representative subset of the data collected by the author on these topics; fuller paradigms are available upon written request.
Mohawk examples are given in the practical orthography described in Deering and Delisle (1976), with the following four changes: (i) the mid unround nasal vowel is written [v] instead of [en]; (ii) the back round nasal vowel is written [u] instead of [on]; (iii) [y] is distinguished from [i]; (iv) stress and vowel length are not marked, these being predictable. Complex sound changes often happen at morpheme boundaries in Mohawk; in some cases the forms given are closer to underlying representations, in other cases they are closer to surface representations.
The following abbreviations are used in the glosses: fact, factual mode; fut, future mode; punc, punctual aspect; hab, habitual aspect; rev, reversive; stat, stative aspect; srfl, semireflexive; dup, duplicative; cis, cislocative; trans, translocative; sim, simultaneous; opt, optative; part, partitive; neg, negative; Q, question particle; iter, iterative. Glosses of agreement include indication of person/gender (1, 2, M, F, N), number (s, d, or p), and series (S (roughly subject), 0 (roughly object), or P (possessor)).
The research reported here was generously supported by The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, grants #410-89-0207 and #410-90-0308, and by FCAR of Quebec, grant #91 -ER-0578. It has been presented to audiences at MIT, Northwestern University, University of Illinois, Princeton University, University of Maryland, University of Stuttgart, University of Geneva, and the Montreal Linguistics Circle. In addition to these audiences, I also wish to thank Jose Bonneau, David Pesetsky, Lisa Travis, Dan Everett, Adriana Chamorro, Edward Ikeda, Ken Hale, Eloise Jelinek, Peggy Speas, Juan Uriagereka, and Paul Postal (as NLLT reviewer) for their comments, suggestions, and help in various ways.
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Mohawk is a Northern Iroquoian language spoken in Quebec, Ontario, and New York. General information about the language can be found in Postal (1979) and Deering and Delisle (1976). The principal information for this work was Ms. Grace Curotte of Kahnawake, Quebec: I thank her for her patience, hospitality and insight. Each type of sentence was also checked with Ms. Carolee Jacobs of Kahnawake. Additional judgments and information were provided by Mr. Frank Jacobs of Kahnawake, Ms. Margaret Lazore, and Ms. Dorothy Lazore of St. Regis, Quebec.
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Baker, M.C. On some subject/object non-asymmetries in Mohawk. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 9, 537–576 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00134750
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00134750