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Abstract
One of the tasks typologists engage in is to discover what all languages share and how they can differ. The most striking feature of California and other Native American languages is the amount of information they package into their verbs. But what exactly makes languages the same or different? There are various influencing factors, such as genetic affiliation and language contact, among others. Often, it is difficult to distinguish shared linguistic features attributed to genetic affiliation from those attributed to language contact, in particular if there is an intense contact for centuries and if there are no written records, as in the case of Chimariko, a now extinct Northern California language.
The present work addresses this and other issues related to language contact and brings together all existing sources on Chimariko to: (1) compile a grammatical description, (2) examine language contact phenomena within Northern California, and (3) see how the linguistic structures and phenomena found in Chimariko relate to those in other languages of the world.
Published and unpublished materials on the Chimariko language and culture are limited to a brief grammatical sketch, a few articles, and handwritten notes from data collection sessions. This work combines these sources into a comprehensive grammatical description. The main source of data comes from 3500 pages of handwritten field notes collected by John Peabody Harrington in the 1920s.
The typological features of Chimariko include: (a) head-marking, (b) mainly suffixes, (c) mostly agglutinating, (d) synthetic to polysynthetic, (e) verb-final word order, and (f) no preference in the order of nominal elements. Typological highlights are: (a) the complex system of argument marking and (b) the near absence of clause combining syntax.
Similarities and language contact phenomena between Chimariko and other Northern California languages include: (a) phoneme inventory, (b) stress system, (c) reduplication, (d) distinction between alienable and inalienable possession, (e) noun incorporation, (f) directional and instrumental suffixes on verbs, and (g) agentive and/or hierarchical person marking, among others.
Overall, this work makes a previously inaccessible language accessible in the form of a grammar and examines typologically rare features and language contact.
