Ebook: Remarks on the Syntax of the Navajo Verb

Ken Hale, MIT and Navajo Language Academy Linguistics Workshop NCC, Tsaile, AZ 7-8/97; 61 p.The study of the various grammatical systems of Navajo—including, among other things, pronominal and anaphoric coreference, person and number agreement, classificatory verb stem selection, and lexical argument structure—implicates in a serious way a detailed analysis of the Navajo verb word and, furthermore, both (a) the structural relations which hold within the verb word, and (b) the grammatical connections between particular parts of the verb word and other parts of the sentence in which the verb appears. In this essay, we will attempt to give an account of a portion of this notoriously complex domain of Navajo grammar, with special focus on two aspects of it: (i) the internal organization and arrangement of the morphological elements which make up the verb word; and (ii) the agreement relations which hold between certain components internal to the verb and the grammatical arguments (e.g., subject, object) which the verb selects in accordance with its lexical properties.