Re: What're "agglutinating" and "isolating"? (was Re: Speedtalk attempts)

Herman Miller wrote:

>How about:
>
>perMIT vs. PERmit
>proDUCE vs. PROduce
>
>Well, these are somewhat odd examples, and it's not productive (you can't
>say ADmit or REduce, for instance), but I actually have an example from one
>of my old languages, Ipsilikhthar. The genitive case of nouns is formed by
>putting a stress on the final syllable: RELni "a dragon", relNI "of a
>dragon".
I use stress changes to mark grammatical differences in Tokana as well,
namely in the area of clitic pronouns.

Tokana has a general phenomenon whereby unstressed absolutive determiners
and pronouns attach to the verb whenever they occur immediately right-
adjacent to it.  (There are some complications, but that's the basic
pattern.)  These suffixed pronouns generally cause stress to shift one
syllable to the right:

        hiela           /HJE.la/        "see"
        hielake         /hje.LA.ke/     "see me"
        hielan          /hje.LAN/       "see him/her"
        hielas          /hje.LAS/       "see them"

Most of these suffixed determiners are reduced versions of the full
stressed pronouns, and have the shape C or CV.  However, the third person
singular inanimate determiner has lost its segmental component altogether,
and now consists just of a rightward stress shift (indicated in the ortho-
graphy either by a diacritic over the final vowel of the stem, or by
a suffixed silent "-h"):

        hiela           /HJE.la/        "see"
        hiela'          /hje.LA/        "see it"
          (hielah)

Matt.

------------------------------------
Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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