Topics in the Grammar of Koryak

Abstract

This thesis consists of four chapters on the grammar of Koryak, a highly-endangered Chukotko-Kamchatkan language of the Russian Far East. In the first chapter, I argue that the distribution of the segments v and w in morpheme-final position needs to be handled by a phonological process that applies to bare morphemes. In the second chapter, I argue for a similar conclusion regarding the language’s vowel harmony system. Both of these chapters there- fore argue for a phonological architecture that includes the morpheme as a domain of to which phonology can apply, as in early generative phonology (Halle 1959; Chomsky and Halle 1968), but unlike in Lexical Phonology (Kiparsky 1982), standard Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993), Stratal Optimality Theory (Bermúdez-Otero 2008), among others. The third and fourth chapters are independent, and concern the syntactic underpinnings of case-marking in Koryak. In the third paper, I argue that moving wh-words cause other nouns in the sentence to change their case-marking in a way that is consistent with a configurational account of ergative and certain instances of dative case (Yip et al. 1987; Marantz 1991; Baker 2015). In the fourth paper, I that inverse case attraction, a phenomenon where the head of a relative clause is marked with the case of the gap inside the relative clause, is the result of an internally-headed relative clause with a left-peripheral head, a type of relative clause that has otherwise only been proposed for the Gur languages of West Africa (Hiraiwa 2005 et seq.) Based on the available data on inverse case attraction in other languages, I further argue that the internal head analysis of inverse case attraction is a general solution to the phenomenon crosslinguistically.