The semantics of time
Subtitle: aspectual categorization in Koyukon Athabaskan
By: Melissa Axelrod.
Series: Studies in the anthropology of North American Indians
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press in cooperation with the American Indian Studies Research Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington
Published: 1993
Place of publication: Lincoln
Language: eng
Number of pages: 199
Subjects: Koyukon language -- Aspect; Koyukon language -- Verb; Koyukon language -- Discourse analysis
Description: "Koyukon is an Athabaskan language spoken along the Yukon and Koyukuk rivers in Alaska. Even among the Athabaskan languages, which are noted for the richness of their aspectual inventories and the diversity of expression possible from these inventories, Koyukon has the most elaborate and richly varied possibilities of morphologically marked derivational aspect. (Aspect is the nature of the action of a verb as to its beginning, duration, completion, or repetition and without referenced to its position in time, and the set of inflected verb forms that indicate aspect).

The work consists of three parts: an examination of the aspectual system, which involved sorting out a complex network of four modes, fifteen aspects, four superaspects, and some 300 aspect-dependent derivational prefix strings; an analysis of the organization of verb-theme categories, which are directly linked to aspectual categories; and an assessment of the function of the aspectual system as a whole."--Pub. desc.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-192) and index.
"Revision of the author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Colorado, 1990"--T.p. verso.