A book review: Grammaire de la langue innue (Drapeau)

[circeus]

Drapeau, Lynn. 2014. Grammaire de la langue innue. Montreal, Quebec: Presses de l’Université du Québec.

My beef with this book is that it tried to reconcile two discordant goals. It is stated right in the introduction [My translation]: "This being a reference work, the conceptual framework was reduced as much as possible while attempting to maintain the distinctions and concepts required by this description." Or, rather "we bent over backward to write a super technical book that could be read by someone with no understanding of linguistics whatsoever." The result is, shall we say, not particularly successful with either of those goals. By virulently eschewing technical terminology and approaches to writing, the text is not particularly legible for someone with a reasonable amount of linguistic knowledge. Yet at the same time, the material is technical enough that eschewing terminology and interlinear glosses as much as humanly possible (the only place where affixes are separated out at all is the one on verbal root formation. Even the derivational affixes are only ever bolded) results in material that a complete layman would no doubt find very hard to comprehend.

Additionally to this major issue, various frustrating aspects mar the book:

• I found the choice of terminology and abbreviation for the verbal classes terribly confusing (it may well have been one of the few parts where actual technical terms were strictly maintained, ironically enough!).
• There were two entire chapters on (respectively) "grammatical functions" (I think it was meant to elaborate on direct/inverse suffixes, but due to the simplification, it read like a how-to manual for didactic 8-grade grammar analysis of objects and subjects as applied to Innu) and "obviation" (which, while alien to Indo-European speakers, does not seem THAT complex to explain, and in fact had been in two different prior parts of the book, IIRC it's only present in innu if one person is animate and the other not, making it even less prominent than in other Algonquian languages.) Honestly, you would think evidentials would be worth more talk than obviation!
• While trying to cover the dialects broadly (even making mentions of the equivalents in Cree and Attikamek^w in multiple places) is a worthwhile goal, the book is left peppered with bits that can be summarised as "there is a lot of phonetic adjustment/variation here and I can't be bothered to describe any of it at all," which is... less than helpful to the reader.
• The terminology chosen for the different parts of verbal roots was highly confusing (Thankfully, I am familiar with the Anishinabe verb chapter from LCKII, which, strangely, pretty much manages to pack possibly more information in less space in that regard.)

By comparison, Nicole Tersis' Forme et sens des mots du tunumiisut was a FAR better organised work for me, with interlinear glosses to boot, though sometimes a little repetitive... So far my favorite bits are the word for computer, qaasaqqitaaq (lit. brain-like, or more elaborately, an encephaloid) and the ambient verb aqsaqniq "there are northern lights" (from the word aqsaq, "play ball", because the Northern Lights are the dead coming out to play ball with severed heads).

[Vilike]

My immediate complaint was that the chapter on phonology was too quickly done with (6 pages), and above all... in the orthography Drapeau uses , long and short vowels are not distinguished, thus her adding footnotes to clarify the difference between similar-looking affixes, even though writing <âîû> throughout would have been simpler.
I don't understand why the official orthography does not use the circumflex when it's readily available on the local Canadian French keyboards.

[circeus]

My immediate complaint was that the chapter on phonology was too quickly done with (6 pages), and above all... in the orthography Drapeau uses , long and short vowels are not distinguished, thus her adding footnotes to clarify the difference between similar-looking affixes, even though writing <âîû> throughout would have been simpler.
I don't understand why the official orthography does not use the circumflex when it's readily available on the local Canadian French keyboards.

Of course, the problem is that the orthography and phonology are attempting to reconcile dialects that display significantly more divergence than those of French or English (though probably not quite as much as Tunumiisut and Kalaallisut). Choosing to use a spelling system that is actually taught in official educational capacities is not exactly the worst choice that could have been made.

Again this is clearly a compromise to avoid at all cost having to use actual (God forbid!) IPA anywhere outside the phonology chapter. Mind you, not focusing on the phonology too much isn't as bad a failure given that the book is most definitely not intended as any sort of teaching grammar.

[Raholeun]

Not quite sure if you are the first in ZBB history, but I must laud you for posting the first grammar review on the new forum. Even though your review was largely negative, I hope you'll write and post more in the future.

[...] the ambient verb aqsaqniq "there are northern lights" (from the word aqsaq, "play ball", because the Northern Lights are the dead coming out to play ball with severed heads).

And this is bad-ass.

[Whimemsz]

.

[circeus]

So, I've recently started re-reading the book and I have quite a few specific beefs I can voice now as I go through it.

While I have commented on Vilike's issue with spelling that "Choosing to use a spelling system that is actually taught in official educational capacities is not exactly the worst choice that could have been made.", the section on spelling still falls short in some regards. Specifically, throughout the book, we regularly encounter a word-final superscript [^u]. in fact, specific attention is brought to that superscript because we are repeatedly told how it turns into a normal, not superscripted [u] before a suffix. Problem: at no point are we told what that superscript is actually supposed to represent whatsoever. And no we can't just assume this to be a labialization marker (and only the linguist would do this, not the actual intended readership!), because no labialization is actually mentioned in the pronunciation/spelling chapter! Any half-competent editor should have caught this oversight.

I have noted that the book aggressively avoids interlinear glosses. Heck, words are very rarely broken in morphemes even in the paradigm tables. This has the effect that any example with more than a few words/morphemes is basically useless because the reader has no actual capacity to analyse the sentence (reminder that the book is clearly written with the non-speaker, non-linguist in mind), so there is no actual context to assist in analysing the Innu sentence in an example aside from a French translation. The translation is usually idiomatic, sometimes stilted to emphasize the particular phrasing used in the Innu, but only if that phrasing is the specific topic at hand.

[sasasha]

Not quite sure if you are the first in ZBB history, but I must laud you for posting the first grammar review on the new forum. Even though your review was largely negative, I hope you'll write and post more in the future.

[...] the ambient verb aqsaqniq "there are northern lights" (from the word aqsaq, "play ball", because the Northern Lights are the dead coming out to play ball with severed heads).

And this is bad-ass.

Also - whilst I know that really this should not surprise me, and if there is anywhere on the internet where it is likely to be the case it is here, but - it really pleases me that someone should write a review in English of a French language grammar of an Algonquian language, and the first response (also in English) is a casual "My immediate complaint was...", as if Drapeau, 2014 was just something everyone has read.

[circeus]

Back onto criticising the book. The more I analyse it, the more I reach the conclusion that a good editor never actually went through the book check for basic readability of its organization and a sensible choice of replacement for the technical terms.

Case in point: Chapter 3 on demonstratives. This chapter discusses seven different groups of words, at least three of which cannot by any reasonably accessible definition be called "demonstratives" (again, a failure of the plan to avoid very technical terms: the book never justifies this grouping enough, nor can it afford to try and figure out a more precise term). Add to that the fact four of these markers are discussed prominently as having both adnominal and pronominal use (the book never notes how this is a common feature of the demonstrative in Germanic languages, including English), but this chapter comes right on the tail of a chapter title "Pronouns" (and I mean "pronouns", not "personal pronouns"m, even though that latter term is what it is about!), and one is left wonder how many other pronouns we are still missing at this stage...

Chapter 4 describes the four main group of verbs. As far as the verb goes, the book is entirely too schizophrenic as to whether various things happening to the verb are morphological derivation that create a new verbal root or grammatical derivation which do not. For example, the entire chapter classifies verbal roots in four classes (with three additional anomalous subsets, such as intransitive verbs that take objects), but it opens by explicitly taking one verb and expressing it in all four of those classes! The choice of abbreviation for those classes are also thoroughly confusing because on the one end VAI stands for "Verbe Animé Intransitif" but VTI? well that's obviously for "Verbe Transitif Inanimé"!

This chapter concludes on a section bafflingly titled La voix de base ("the base voice"). Voice has nothing to do with this. This a poor choice to mean the argument structure of the verbal classes, and implies there are verbs for which this "base voice" is not the active voice (at this point, given the schizophrenia mentioned above, it's not even clear whether verbs have assigned argument structures or whether that structure is determined by derivation!). The first problem is... the entire chapter was just spent describing those verbal classes' argument structure. Why is there a need for repeating this now? And only after going through all that (in a bulleted list where the word "voix de base" is repeatedly and useless put in small caps, dragging the eye away from the more useful part of the entry) are we told that this was explained because the "voix de base" determines the lemma form in the dictionaries. Ah, now this explains the constant mentions that passives and impersonals are not "base voice"... Again, note the incapacity to establish whether a passive is a verbal feature or a verbal derivation: if it is a verbal derivation that any transitive verb can go through, it is fairly self-evident that passive (or reflexive or reciprocal...) verbs have no business being lemma entries in the dictionary!

[Richard W]

Ah, now this explains the constant mentions that passives and impersonals are not "base voice"... Again, note the incapacity to establish whether a passive is a verbal feature or a verbal derivation: if it is a verbal derivation that any transitive verb can go through, it is fairly self-evident that passive (or reflexive or reciprocal...) verbs have no business being lemma entries in the dictionary!

While your complaint about the book is probably valid, your argument isn't. Firstly, you have it backwards. It should be that if every passive (or reflexive or reciprocal...) verb is derived from a transitive verb, then they have no place being lemma entries.

Secondly, that doesn't always work well. In English dictionaries, agent nouns and 'potential' adjectives (the -able deverbal adjectives) are generally treated as lemmas, and abstract nouns related to adjectives are generally also lemmas. I had a look at what the English Wiktionary did with Russian verbs, and found that they give perfective and imperfective verbs equal status.

[circeus]

Ah, now this explains the constant mentions that passives and impersonals are not "base voice"... Again, note the incapacity to establish whether a passive is a verbal feature or a verbal derivation: if it is a verbal derivation that any transitive verb can go through, it is fairly self-evident that passive (or reflexive or reciprocal...) verbs have no business being lemma entries in the dictionary!

While your complaint about the book is probably valid, your argument isn't. Firstly, you have it backwards. It should be that if every passive (or reflexive or reciprocal...) verb is derived from a transitive verb, then they have no place being lemma entries.

Secondly, that doesn't always work well. In English dictionaries, agent nouns and 'potential' adjectives (the -able deverbal adjectives) are generally treated as lemmas, and abstract nouns related to adjectives are generally also lemmas. I had a look at what the English Wiktionary did with Russian verbs, and found that they give perfective and imperfective verbs equal status.

I don't think I have it backward. I'm fairly sure what I'm intending to say and actually saying is... well... exactly what you're saying I should be saying. I would compare it to something like the negative conjugation in Japanese, or French reflexives. Indeed what the book explicitly says is that passives are almost never a lemma entry in Innu dictionaries. Deverbals and adjectivals (the later of which I don't think even exist in Innu) are entirely irrelevant to this argument. If anything, it's the same reason why use of a noun as a mass versus count noun in French (les pelouses "the lawns" vs. de la pelouse "sod/turf") does not give rise to separate dictionary entries. In Russian, I seem to recall (I am not particularly acquainted with it) not all verb have separate roots, and the derivation is frequently not regular, so separate entries are warranted.

What I'm getting at more generally here is:

A) Throughout the book there are moments where there is reference to "deriving a new/separate verbal root" (e.g. to allow a verb to take an inanimate subject instead of animate) but elsewhere the same process may be discussed as though it were a purely grammatical process. And this starts very early. At this stage we haven't even been presented with the actual verbal paradigm, much less the non-active voice! And yet there is repeated mention that passives for some of the verbal classes are formed differently than those of other classes...
B) All too often information is presented without explaining why it is relevant to discuss it, and particularly to discuss it at that particular point in the book. I'm not sure discussing lemma forms (and especially with this strange choice of vocabulary) was relevant to begin with in a grammar that explicitly doesn't want to provide more than token vocabulary material. That's for the dictionaries to explain!

[Richard W]

I had a look at what the English Wiktionary did with Russian verbs, and found that they give perfective and imperfective verbs equal status.

In Russian, I seem to recall (I am not particularly acquainted with it) not all verb have separate roots, and the derivation is frequently not regular, so separate entries are warranted.

Thus the messiness of the relationship determines how it is handled in the lexicon.

What I'm getting at more generally here is:

A) ...And yet there is repeated mention that passives for some of the verbal classes are formed differently than those of other classes...
B) All too often information is presented without explaining why it is relevant to discuss it, and particularly to discuss it at that particular point in the book. I'm not sure discussing lemma forms (and especially with this strange choice of vocabulary) was relevant to begin with in a grammar that explicitly doesn't want to provide more than token vocabulary material. That's for the dictionaries to explain!

Doesn't the grammar determine what information is required from the lexicon? In theory, the lexicon and grammar support one another. If the formation of the passive is complicated, one might naturally expect to find the passive forms in the lexicon. I can well imagine that the author of the grammar might have low expectations of what the front matter of a dictionary may provide. Besides which, isn't part of the standard operating procedure of a dictionary, 'When all else fails, read the instructions'?

[circeus]

Doesn't the grammar determine what information is required from the lexicon? In theory, the lexicon and grammar support one another. If the formation of the passive is complicated, one might naturally expect to find the passive forms in the lexicon. I can well imagine that the author of the grammar might have low expectations of what the front matter of a dictionary may provide. Besides which, isn't part of the standard operating procedure of a dictionary, 'When all else fails, read the instructions'?

Let me summarize yet again what I was saying: "This book is not a dictionary, so why does it explain (in excruciating details) what verb forms are or are not lemmas in the dictionaries?" A statement to the effect of "Innu verbs are listed as third person independent conjugation in the dictionary and in the coming lists of examples because they have no form that can be said to not have a conjugation mark of some sort." is really all that this grammar needs to tell you.

The elaborate details about how passives and reflexives and reciprocals etc. are not separate dictionary entries (apparently the only exceptions are some especially common antipassives) is not only unnecessary in a grammar, but a source of confusion to the reader because... well, to the book's target readers the idea that a reflexive or passive is not a separate dictionary entry is rather self-evident.

[KathTheDragon]

It's also worth pointing out that if verb forms are not predictable based on the standard citation form, then you include additional "principle parts" under the same lemma as that citation form.

[Kuchigakatai]

Chapter 4 describes the four main group of verbs. As far as the verb goes, the book is entirely too schizophrenic as to whether various things happening to the verb are morphological derivation that create a new verbal root or grammatical derivation which do not. For example, the entire chapter classifies verbal roots in four classes (with three additional anomalous subsets, such as intransitive verbs that take objects), but it opens by explicitly taking one verb and expressing it in all four of those classes! The choice of abbreviation for those classes are also thoroughly confusing because on the one end VAI stands for "Verbe Animé Intransitif" but VTI? well that's obviously for "Verbe Transitif Inanimé"!

These are pretty common/standard abbreviations in works on North American languages though, that's the thing, as confusing as they are (I agree "AI" should really be only "IA"):
- TA: transitive animate
- TI: transitive inanimate
- AI: animate intransitive
- II: inanimate intransitive

[Kuchigakatai]

Chapter 4 describes the four main group of verbs. As far as the verb goes, the book is entirely too schizophrenic as to whether various things happening to the verb are morphological derivation that create a new verbal root or grammatical derivation which do not. For example, the entire chapter classifies verbal roots in four classes (with three additional anomalous subsets, such as intransitive verbs that take objects), but it opens by explicitly taking one verb and expressing it in all four of those classes! The choice of abbreviation for those classes are also thoroughly confusing because on the one end VAI stands for "Verbe Animé Intransitif" but VTI? well that's obviously for "Verbe Transitif Inanimé"!

These are pretty common/standard abbreviations in works on North American languages though, that's the thing, as confusing as they are (I agree "AI" should really be only "IA"):
- TA: transitive animate
- TI: transitive inanimate
- AI: animate intransitive
- II: inanimate intransitive

Update: I've been informed this is a convention of Algonquian linguistics in particular, and that the change in word order is probably a mnemonic about whether the "animate/inanimate" marked is the subject or object. Assume SVO order, and then "animate/inanimate" appears before "intransitive" because to refer to the subject, but it appears after "transitive" to refer to the object. But the person who told me also said this may be something some people may have made up after the the convention was established...

Code: Select all

S V O

A I
I I
  T A
  T I

I.e., AI = animate subject and intransitive verb,
II = inanimate subject and intransitive verb,
TA = transitive verb and animate object,
TI = transitive verb and inanimate object.