The Choctaw language, indigenous to the southeastern United States, now
with its greatest concentrations ofspeakers in Missis- sippi, Oklahoma,
and Los Angeles, has in the main escaped the
scrutinyoftheoreticallinguistics.ItisnotthatChoctaw isanintrin-
sicallyuninterestinglanguage- aquickglanceataclausewithfive agreement
controllers and a mismatch between the caseofafree- standingnominaland
its agreement affix should dispelthat notion. Rather it is, I think, the
question of what we can learn from a
languageinwhichNPsdon'tmovearound,"WHs"don'tfront, and gaps simply arise
from pronominalization. My hope is that the presentvolume,
takentogetherwithagrowingliteraturespurredon by the workofPamMunro and
her students atUCLA, will bring Choctawintothelightofdayand into the
circleoflanguagescon- sidered when constructing theories that define
"possible human language". Thepresentstudy, arevisionofmy
1981dissertation(University ofCalifornia, SanDiego),
focusesfirstandforemostontheChoctaw agreementsystem,
takingthisasthekeytothestructureofChoctaw syntax. The immediate goal,
then, is to provide a unified account ofthestructures and rules
underlyingtheagreement system.Along the way a rangeofgrammatical
phenomena is examined, taken as evidence for particular structural
configurations, and incorporated into
awell-integratedaccountofmorphologicaland syntacticfacts. The
resultsbearon anumber ofcurrent issues, includingthe Un- accusative
Hypothesis, the existence of demotions, the nature of antipassive,
disjunctive rule application, universals of causative constructions, and
others.For these reasons Choctawdeserves the scrutinyoftheoreticians.
The data forming the corpus for analysis represent a variety of Oklahoma
Choctaw.They were collected from a nativespeaker in San Diego between
1978 and 1982 and from various speakers in Oklahoma during two extended
visits to Broken Bow in 1980. I lX PREFACE x
wishtothankthespeakerswhohelpedmebysharingtheirlanguage
andencouragingmystudies.MyworkonChoctawwassupportedin partbyfundsfrom
theNationalScienceFoundation(throughgrant
numberBNS78-17498totheUniversityofCalifornia, SanDiego),
theAmericanPhilosophicalSociety(throughaPhillipsFundgrant),
andtheDepartmentofLinguisticsatUCSD.
