Browsing by Author "McDonald, Brittany"

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    The Interactional Structure of Nominals: An Investigation of Paranouns
    (2021-07-30) McDonald, Brittany; Ritter, Elizabeth; Storoshenko, Dennis Ryan; Whaley, Ben; Ritter, Elizabeth
    Pronouns are often thought to be a uniform syntactic class both inside and outside of linguistics. Despite this, comparing languages like Japanese and English reveals striking differences between their pronoun paradigms. English pronouns express contrasting sets of person, number, and gender features (i.e., phi-features), but Japanese pronouns encode far more content like the relative age, gender, and social status of the speaker, addressee, and other referents. Ritter & Wiltschko (2019) propose that the Japanese and Korean so-called pronouns are actually a different type of nominal called paranouns. This thesis takes Ritter & Wiltschko’s conceptual description of paranouns and develops a set of explicit diagnostics for distinguishing pronouns and paranouns and tests a sample of six East and Southeast Asian languages whose so-called pronouns have similar properties to those of Japanese and Korean (namely: Burmese, Khmer, Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, and Malay/Indonesian). It also tests the broader syntactic distribution of paranouns in the context of binding theory. This thesis concludes that five of the six languages tested have paranouns rather than pronouns while one language, Malay/Indonesian, appears to be transitioning from having pronouns to having paranouns. It also determines that the binding theoretic properties of paranouns are distinct from those of pronouns.
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    Plurality as a Phi-Feature in Non-Inflectional Plurals
    (2020-11-19) McDonald, Brittany
    Some languages, such as Pirahã, express plurality through means other than plural inflectional morphology. Wiltschko (2008) calls these alternative plural marking strategies non-inflectional plurals and develops several diagnostic criteria for determining whether or not a language is an inflectional plural-marking language, illustrated with examples from English (an inflectional plural-marking language) Halkomelem (a non-inflectional plural language). These criteria pertain to obligatoriness, agreement, compounding, and derivational morphology. This paper expands on these criteria, drawing two more from Greenberg’s (1963) Universals, to answer the following research question: Do non-inflectional plurals possess a plural phi-feature? This paper explores this question by looking at certain properties of Khmer and Thai, two languages which appear to have non-inflectional plurals, to look for any evidence of the presence of phi-features in their respective plural-marking strategies.
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    Policy Speaks Volumes: How Canada's Bilingual Status Affects Indigenous Languages
    (2022) McDonald, Brittany; Young, Lisa
    While Canada may be famously recognized as a bilingual country, the reality is that the rich linguistic diversity encountered on this land long predates European colonization. Through centuries of genocide, forced assimilation, and attempted erasure, many Indigenous languages live on despite the best efforts of the Canadian state. Today, as Canada claims to be on a path of reconciliation, the hierarchy of the Official Languages over Indigenous languages is perpetuated through policies that inhibit Indigenous language revitalization efforts. To remedy this, Canada should build a framework that provides Indigenous Nations and communities with adequate support to protect and revitalize their languages. This capstone analyzes select language policies at the international, federal, and provincial/territorial level to identify promising approaches to language recognition and revitalization. It then outlines three policy alternatives to address the legislative gaps: the status quo, granting Cree and Inuktitut Official Language status, and establishing Regional First Languages. These three alternatives are then evaluated according to four important criteria: recognition, access, timeliness and acceptability to Official Language minority groups. Based on this analysis, it recommends the establishment of Regional First Languages, and concludes that the federal government should provide more capacity and resources to Indigenous Nations and communities for Indigenous-led revitalization efforts.