Identifying meaningful elements Summary
We have discussed three types of reasoning that can be used to identify the meaningful elements of an utterance (whether parts of a word or words in a sentence): minimal contrast, recurring partials, and pattern matching. In practice, when working on a new body of data, we often use all three at once, without stopping to think which method we use for which element. Sometimes, however, it is important to be able to state explicitly the pattern of reasoning which we use to arrive at certain conclusions. For example, suppose that one of our early hypotheses about the language is contradicted by further data. We need to be able to go back and determine what evidence that hypothesis was based on so that we can re-evaluate that evidence in the light of additional information. This will help us to decide whether the hypothesis can be modified to account for all the facts, or whether it needs to be abandoned entirely. Grammatical analysis involves an endless process of “guess and check”–forming hypotheses, testing them against further data, and modifying or abandoning those which do not work.
Using the methods of recurring partials and minimal contrast, we have identified the following meaningful elements in the Isthmus Zapotec examples:
(11) ñee ‘foot’ ka– (plural marker)
ʒigi ‘chin’ –be ‘his’
ʒike ‘shoulder’ –luʔ ‘your(sg)’
–tu ‘your(pl)’
–du ‘ou
In predicting the existence of a word kañeeluʔ, which should mean ‘your feet,’ we also made use of a hypothesis about how these elements combine with each other; but we did not explicitly state this hypothesis. That is, we have not yet tried to define the order of elements in a Zapotec word. In Representing word structure and Analyzing position classes we will introduce a way of representing this kind of information.
