This study presents the first investigation of the development of possessive constructions in Northern East Cree, a polysynthetic language indigenous to Canada. It examines transcripts from naturalistic recording sessions involving one adult and one child, from age 2;01.12 to 3;08.24. Findings reveal that, despite the frequency of possessive inflection in child-directed speech, the child overwhelmingly produces a possessive construction that circumvents this morphology. This construction, named here the equational possessive strategy (EPS), is largely undescribed in existing literature but is the primary mechanism for the child to express possession. These findings have potential implications for the cross-linguistic acquisition of possessive morphology and the connections between child-directed speech and child language production.

In this chapter, the authors examine the role of language archiving in endangered-language scholarship. First they explore the history of archiving for endangered languages, from the age of Boas and the archiving of analog materials through the rise of the endangered-language movement and the development of best practices for digital archiving to the current era of established archiving standards. Then they discuss a potential future for language archiving, that of the participatory model of language archiving, which is radically user-centered and draws on trends in the archival sciences. Next they present some of the extant archives for language documentation, the members of the Digital Endangered Languages and Music Archiving Network. Finally, because archiving is an activity that is now available to anyone undertaking endangered-language work, they close by presenting the steps one would take to work with an archive to deposit one’s own materials.

Kidd and Garcia cogently articulate scientific problems related to intellectual merit that are associated with the lack of language diversity in L1 acquisition research. However, science must also consider stakes related to the broader impacts of research. Focusing on Indigenous language communities in North America, I discuss ways that the lack of language coverage causes linguistic science to fall short in making broader impacts in areas such as speech-language pathology and language revitalization programs.

No abstract

No abstract