Tsilhqút’ín, also known as Chilcotin, is a northern Athabaskan language spoken by the people of the Chilco River (Tsilhqóx) in Interior British Columbia. Until now, the literature on Tsilhqút’ín contained very little description of the language. With forty-seven consonants and six vowels plus tone, the phonological system is notoriously complex. This book is the first comprehensive grammar of Tsilhqút’ín. It covers all aspects of linguistic structure – phonology, morphology, and syntax – including negation and questions. Also included are three annotated texts. The product of decades of work by linguist Eung-Do Cook, this book makes an important contribution to the ongoing documentation of Athabaskan languages.
This handbook provides broad coverage of the languages indigenous to North America, with special focus on typologically interesting features and areal characteristics, surveys of current work, and topics of particular importance to communities. The volume is divided into two major parts: subfields of linguistics and family sketches. The subfields include those that are customarily addressed in discussions of North American languages (sounds and sound structure, words, sentences), as well as many that have received somewhat less attention until recently (tone, prosody, sociolinguistic variation, directives, information structure, discourse, meaning, language over space and time, conversation structure, evidentiality, pragmatics, verbal art, first and second language acquisition, archives, evolving notions of fieldwork). Family sketches cover major language families and isolates and highlight topics of special value to communities engaged in work on language maintenance, documentation, and revitalization.
The Archive of Place weaves together a series of narratives about environmental history in a particular location � British Columbia's Chilcotin Plateau. In the mid-1990s, the Chilcotin was at the centre of three territorial conflicts. Opposing groups, in their struggle to control the fate of the region and its resources, invoked different understandings of its past � and different types of evidence � to justify their actions. These controversies serve as case studies, as William Turkel examines how people interpret material traces to reconstruct past events, the conditions under which such interpretation takes place, and the role that this interpretation plays in historical consciousness and social memory. It is a wide-ranging and original study that extends the span of conventional historical research.
The First Nations of British Columbia, 2nd edition, is a concise and accessible overview of First Nations peoples, cultures, and issues in the province. Robert Muckle familiarizes readers with the history, diversity, and complexity of First Nations to provide a context for contemporary concerns and initiatives. This fully revised edition Updates names, suggested readings, maps, and photographs Explains the current treaty negotiation process Provides highlights of agreements between First Nations and governments up to the present Details past and present government policies Identifies the territories of major groups in the province Gives information on populations, reserves, bands, and language groups Summarizes archaeological, ethnographic, historical, legal, and political issues. The First Nations of British Columbia is an indispensable resource for teachers and students, and an excellent introduction for anyone interested in BC’s First Nations.
"An extraordinary volume that provides nothing less than a detailed cognitive mapping of the terrain for everyone who wants to engage in radical politics."—Slavoj Žižek, author of Living in the End Times “Keywords for Radicals recognizes that language is both a weapon and terrain of struggle, and that all of us committed to changing our social and material reality, to making a world justice-rich and oppression-free, cannot drop words such as ‘democracy,’ ‘occupation,’ ‘colonialism,’ ‘race,’ ‘sovereignty,’ or ‘love’ without a fight. —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination "From its thought-provoking Introduction though its energizing accounts of the tensions underlying our most prized concepts, Keywords for Radicals will be indispensable to any scholar or activist who is serious about critique and change."—Stephen Duncombe, editor of Cultural Resistance Reader “A primer for a new era of political protest.” —Jack Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity “This keywords upgrade puts powerful weapons into revolutionaries' hands. Unexpected entries expand into new terrain.… Indispensable.” —Jodi Dean, author of The Communist Horizon In Keywords (1976), Raymond Williams devised a "vocabulary" that reflected the vast social transformations of the post-war period. He revealed how these transformations could be grasped by investigating changes in word usage and meaning. Keywords for Radicals—part homage, part development—asks: What vocabulary might illuminate the social transformations marking our own contested present? How do these words define the imaginary of today's radical left? With insights from dozens of scholars and troublemakers, Keywords for Radicals explores the words that shape our political landscape. Each entry highlights a term's contested variations, traces its evolving usage, and speculates about what its historical mutations can tell us. More than a glossary, this is a crucial study of the power of language and the social contradictions hidden within it. Contributors include Patrick Bond, Silvia Federici, John Bellamy Foster, Joy James, Ilan Pappé, Justin Podur, Nina Power, Mab Segrest, and over forty others. Kelly Fritsch is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Clare O'Connor is a doctoral student in Communication at the University of Southern California. A.K. Thompson teaches social theory at Fordham University in New York.
To what extent do complex phonological patterns require the postulation of universal mechanisms specific to language? In this volume, we explore the Emergent Hypothesis, that the innate language-specific faculty driving the shape of adult grammars is minimal, with grammar development relying instead on cognitive capacities of a general nature. Generalisations about sounds, and about the way sounds are organised into meaningful units, are constructed in a bottom-up fashion: As such, phonology is emergent. We present arguments for considering the Emergent Hypothesis, both conceptually and by working through an extended example in order to demonstrate how an adult grammar might emerge from the input encountered by a learner. Developing a concrete, data-driven approach, we argue that the conventional, abstract notion of unique underlying representations is unmotivated; such underlying representations would require some innate principle to ensure their postulation by a learner. We review the history of the concept and show that such postulated forms result in undesirable phonological consequences. We work through several case studies to illustrate how various types of phonological patterns might be accounted for in the proposed framework. The case studies illustrate patterns of allophony, of productive and unproductive patterns of alternation, and cases where the surface manifestation of a feature does not seem to correspond to its morphological source. We consider cases where a phonetic distinction that is binary seems to manifest itself in a way that is morphologically ternary, and we consider cases where underlying representations of considerable abstractness have been posited in previous frameworks. We also consider cases of opacity, where observed phonological properties do not neatly map onto the phonological generalisations governing patterns of alternation.
Nta’tugwaqanminen provides evidence that the Mi’gmaq of the Gespe’gewa’gi (Northern New Brunswick and the Gaspé Peninsula) have occupied their territory since time immemorial. They were the sole occupants of it prior to European settlement and occupied it on a continuous basis. This book was written through an alliance between the Mi’gmaq of Northern Gespe’gewa’gi (Gaspé Peninsula), their Elders and a group of eminent researchers in the field with the aim of reclaiming their history, both oral and written, in the context of what is known as knowledge re-appropriation. It also provides non-Aboriginal peoples with a view of how Mi’gmaq history looks when it is written from an Indigenous perspective. There are two voices in the book — that of the Mi’gmaq of the Gespe’gewa’gi, including the Elders, as they act as narrators of the collective history, and that of the researchers, who studied all possible aspects of this history, including advanced investigation on place names as indicators of migration patterns. Nta’tugwaqanminen speaks of the Gespe’gewa’gi Mi’gmaq vision, history, relation to the land, past and present occupation of the territory and their place names and what they reveal in terms of ancient territorial occupation. It speaks of the treaties they agreed to with the British Crown, the respect of these treaties on the part of the Mi’gmaq people and the disrespect of them from the various levels of governments. This book speaks about the dispossession the Mi’gmaq of Gespe’gewa’gi had to endure while the European settlers illegally occupied and developed the Gaspé Peninsula to their own advantage and the rights and titles the Mi’gmaq people still have on their lands.
More than thirty years ago, section 35 of the Constitution Act recognized and affirmed “the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada.” Hailed at the time as a watershed moment in the legal and political relationship between Indigenous peoples and settler societies in Canada, the constitutional entrenchment of Aboriginal and treaty rights has proven to be only the beginning of the long and complicated process of giving meaning to that constitutional recognition. In From Recognition to Reconciliation, twenty leading scholars reflect on the continuing transformation of the constitutional relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. The book features essays on themes such as the role of sovereignty in constitutional jurisprudence, the diversity of methodologies at play in these legal and political questions, and connections between the Canadian constitutional experience and developments elsewhere in the world.
We all use Canadian English every day: when we order a pizza "all-dressed", hope to get a "seat-sale" to go south during "March break", or "book off" work to meet with a "CGA" to discuss "RRSPs". Language embodies our nation''s identity, and The Canadian Oxford Dictionary, in its 1,728 pages,covers all aspects of Canadian life. Never before have Canadians been able to see their language, and themselves, so accurately and comprehensively described in a dictionary. The loggers of the west coast, the wheat farmers of the Prairies, the fishermen of the Atlantic provinces, the trappers ofthe North; Canada''s Aboriginal peoples, its British and French settlers, and the more recent arrivals, whether they came from Ukraine, Italy, South Asia or elsewhere - all have contributed to making Canadian English unique, and the dictionary thus reflects the great sweep of Canadian life. Itcontains over 2,000 distinctly Canadian words and meanings, more than any other Canadian dictionary, covering every region of the country. Whether you call your favorite doughnut a jambuster, a bismark, a Burlington bun, or the more prosaic jelly doughnut may depend on where you live in Canada, butthey will all be found in The Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Of course, this is not just a dictionary of Canadian words: its 130,000 entries combine in one reference book information on English as it is used worldwide and as it is used particularly in Canada. Definitions, worded for ease ofcomprehension, are presented so the meaning most familiar to Canadians appears first and foremost. Each of these entries is exceptionally reliable, the result of thorough research into the language and Oxford''s unparalleled language resources. Five professionally trained lexicographers spent fiveyears examining databases containing over 20 million words of Canadian text from more than 8,000 Canadian sources of an astonishing diversity. Inuit Art Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Canadian Business, and Equinox; the work of writers such as Jack Hodgins, Sandra Birdsell, David Adams Richards, andPierre Berton; daily and weekly newspapers from across the country; and, of course, the Canadian Tire catalogue - all find a place in the evidence of The Canadian Oxford Dictionary. The lexicographers also examined an additional 20 million words of international English sources. For many Canadiansone of the more puzzling aspects of writing is trying to determine whether to use the American spelling or the British spelling. Should it be "colour" or "color", "theater" or "theatre", "programme" or "program"? By examining our extensive Canadian databases, our lexicographers have been able todetermine which, in fact, is the more common spelling: colour, theatre and program. Favoured Canadian pronunciations have also been determined by surveying a nationwide group of respondents. Oxford''s thorough research has also ensured that new words that have recently appeared are well-represented.So if you''re someone who puts on your "bicycle shorts" and "blades" over to the gym to do some "crunches" for your "abs" followed by work on your "lats", "pecs" and "delts", finishing up with a "step" class, because you''re afraid that being a "chocoholic" who loves "comfort food" will affect your"body mass index" and you want to avoid "yo-yo dieting", you''ll find all these common words in The Canadian Oxford Dictionary. An added feature of this dictionary is its encyclopedic element. It includes short biographies of over 800 Canadians, ranging from Elvis Stojko, Celine Dion and JeanBeliveau to Nellie McClung, Lester B. Pearson, and Kim Campbell. It also contains entries on 5,000 individuals and mythical figures of international significance, and almost 6,000 place names, more than 1,200 of them Canadian. Indeed, all Canadian towns with a population of 5,000 or more arefeatured, and their entries not only explain the origin of the place name, but also include the population based on the 1996 census. With the publication of The Canadian Oxford Dictionary, Oxford University Press adds another work to its highly respected range of dictionaries, and Canadians finallyhave a dictionary that truly reflects their nations.
