Documentation of Kumiay (Yuman), a language of Northwest Mexico: reflections on prosodic domains and boundaries

Abstract

Kumiay (Kumeeyaay) is a highly endangered language of the Yuman family whose traditional territory traverses the contemporary borders of Baja California (Mexico) and southern California (USA). This talk seeks to broadly present the processes and results of several parallel projects of language documentation of Kumiay (south of the border) which have been the outcome of community and researcher-University negotiation and work, focused on the language spoken in San José de la Zorra (Mexico).  While the documentation effort acknowledges and acts as retribution to the historical and current debt that the Mexican state and its institutions have with the indigenous people, theoretical problems in many fields of linguistics arise as questions to be answered for scientific interest and practical matter. The second half of the talk will present an actual problem of the phonology-morphology interface in Kumiay which poses questions for the alignment between the prosodic hierarchy and the morpho-syntactic structure, specifically at the final edge of the prosodic word. The generalization that can be made is that suffixes in Kumiay provide clear signs of not being part of the phonological word, at least not as the rest of phonological specifications of that unit. At the same time, they cannot be classified as "classic" clitics either. The proposed analysis interprets suffixes as morphological units which are necessarily processed in a separate prosodic domain as stems and prefixes and tries to give an answer of which level is the sponsor of these processes. 

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