A Semantic Grammar of Kiowa

This volume is a theoretically-driven documentation of the semantics of the Kiowa language. Andrew McKenzie draws on a range of data sources to explore topics including modality, quantification, gradability and degrees, attitudes and intensions, aspect, anaphora, modification, and social/psychological meaning.

This volume is a theoretically-driven documentation of the semantics of the Kiowa language. It draws on discoveries and concepts from formal semantics to analyze elements of meaning that are not always visible in the morphology. In doing so, it fills crucial gaps in language documentation and serves as a basis for semantic typology. The book is organized according to semantic, rather than structural, phenomena, with chapters exploring modality, quantification, gradability and degrees, attitudes and intensions, aspect, anaphora, modification, and social/psychological meaning. Kiowa is a polysynthetic language, so significant attention is paid to the meaning of complex word formations. The discussions are firmly rooted in formal analysis, but the book avoids formalization in order to remain accessible to linguists from any methodological tradition or specialty. A more complete picture of the phenomena involved emerges from the range of data sources used: context-based elicitation with first-language speakers, archival texts and recordings made by linguists and community members, and earlier linguistic documentation going back to the 1880s. The chapters provide elicited examples with contexts or sentences that test entailments, presuppositions, or truth-conditions, allowing linguists to replicate these tests in languages that they study. Written by a Kiowa community member with the invaluable help of elder speakers, the book will also help community language preservation efforts, transmitting vital parts of the language to future generations and allowing teachers and learners to pick up the subtler aspects of conversational Kiowa.