Semantic Dimensions of Tsuut'ina Verbs: A Corpus-Based Investigation of Synonymy and Hyponymy
Creators: Antonsen, Karoline
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2023

<p>Tsuut’ina is a language in the Dene (Athabaskan) language family spoken by approximately 175 people. Due to its low speaker numbers, it is considered critically endangered. Existing literature describing Tsuut’ina does not include discussions of lexical relations, the relationships between meanings of words including synonymy (where two words have the same/similar meanings) and hyponymy (where one word means a “type” of another word’s meaning).<br>
    The Tsuut’ina language, like other languages in the Dene family, has a complex verb system made up of a series of inflectional morphemes and a verb theme organized into what is called a verb template. Tsuut’ina verbs can be organized into verb theme categories following the methodology of Kari (1979), which includes a sub-category of verbs called classificatory verbs. Classificatory verbs assign physical properties of usually shape or texture to the absolutive which impact the context of the utterance.<br>
    There are two key issues being addressed in this thesis. The first is: can corpus data provide enough information to determine lexical relations in a language? And second: are hyponym and synonym lexical relations present and observable among Tsuut’ina verbs? A selection of corpora including a preliminary lexical database made up of recordings from the Onespot-Sapir glossary, the Tsuut’ina Narratives compiled by Starlight and Donovan (Eds.) (2018), the Sarsi texts transcribed from Goddard (1915), some selected examples pulled from A Sarcee Grammar by Cook (1984), and a collection of sentences confirmed by a native Tsuut’ina speaker (Personal communication, J. Holden, February 25, 2023) were used to pull examples of two sets of verb candidates: verbs containing the meaning ‘eat’ and verbs exhibiting the stative neuter ‘S is lying’ and active ‘pick O up’ meanings of classificatory verbs. These verb candidates were analysed following the interpretations of lexical relations put forth by Cruse (1986, 2000, 2002) and Murphy (2003). Cruse follows a lexical model which proposes that synonyms exist on a scale from more strictly synonymous to less strictly synonymous starting with absolute synonymy, followed by cognitive synonymy, then plesionymy (elsewhere called near-synonymy), and finally non-synonymy. Hypernyms and hyponyms are judged on a list of goodness-of-exemplar features that determine whether a set of lexical items are hyponymous based on how well they fulfil certain properties. Murphy puts forth the Relation by Contrast metalexical approach to both synonymy and hyponymy where each lexical relation is determined when the lexical items in a set share all the same contextually-relevant properties but one. For synonymy, following the model of Relation by Contrast-Synonymy, the items in a synonym set share all contextually relevant properties except for form. For hyponymy, following the model of Relation by Contrast-Asymmetric Lexical Contrast, the items in a hyponymy set share all contextually relevant properties but one with the subsets which operate beneath it, and those subsets share all contextually relevant properties but one with each other.<br>
    The analyses conducted on the Tsuut’ina verb candidates using both Murphy and Cruse’s approaches to synonymy and hyponymy found evidence pointing towards hyponymy for both sets of candidates. Some of the evidence is speculative, as speaker intuitions are required to confirm or test for some properties and characteristics required by each approach. Because they require speaker intuitions, these requirements are less easily sought after using corpus data. Therefore, though some evidence for hyponymy is found using the available corpora, the picture is still incomplete.</p>