Semantics of Time: Aspectual Categorization in Koyukon Athabaskan

Axelrod, Melissa

ISBN 10: 0803210329 / ISBN 13: 9780803210325

Published by University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, in cooperation with the American Indian Studies Research Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington, 1993

About this Item

Studies in the Anthropology of North American Indians. xi, 199 pp. Very slight lean to spine. Issued without dust jacket.

Seller Inventory # 011677

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Semantics of Time: Aspectual Categorization in Koyukon Athabaskan
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, in cooperation with the American Indian Studies Research Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington
• Publication Date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0803210329
• ISBN 13: 9780803210325
• Binding: Cloth
• Condition: Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Language, Reference
  • Native American

About this title

Synopsis

Koyukon is an Athabaskan language spoken along the Yukon and Koyukuk rivers in Alaska. Even among the Athabaskan languages, which are noted for the richness of their aspectual inventories and the diversity of expression possible from these inventories, Koyukon has the most elaborate and richly varied possibilities of morphologically marked derivational aspect. (Aspect is the nature of the action of a verb as to its beginning, duration, completion, or repetition and without referenced to its position in time, and the set of inflected verb forms that indicate aspect).

The work consists of three parts: an examination of the aspectual system, which involved sorting out a complex network of four modes, fifteen aspects, four superaspects, and some 300 aspect-dependent derivational prefix strings; an analysis of the organization of verb-theme categories, which are directly linked to aspectual categories; and an assessment of the function of the aspectual system as a whole.

About the Author

Melissa Axelrod currently teaches in the English department at California State University, San Bernardino.