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    Existential and standard negation in Northern Dene
    (2020) Lovick, Olga
    This paper is a comparative analysis of existential and standard negation across Northern Dene. There are two strategies for existential negation: some languages use a negative verb, while others use a negative morpheme reconstructed as *də-weˑ. Standard negation involves negative inflection in some languages; most of them require additional preverbal or postverbal negative particles. The languages without negative inflection also fall into two groups. Some use a preverbal morpheme reconstructed as *də-weˑ, while the others use a postverbal negative auxiliary related to the negative verb used in existential negation. The data surveyed here demonstrates that standard negation with *də-weˑ is widespread in the Northern Dene languages, suggesting that it is an older negation strategy than has been assumed in the literature. The author also shows that the postverbal auxiliary is the result of the negative existential cycle and demonstrates that Dene languages share typological tendencies for the placement of negative particles.
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    Glossing Dene Languages
    (Alaska Native Language Center, 2020) Hargus, Sharon; Semenova, Olga M.; Tuttle, Siri G.
    General frameworks for glossing linguistic examples (Lehmann 1982, 2004 and particularly the Leipzig Glossing Rules (LGR) by Comrie, Haspelmath, and Bickel 2008, 2015) aim to make the sharing of grammatical information more efficient, consistent and intelligible. While they have improved grammatical communication for many languages, language-family specific facts and conventions can be difficult to integrate into cross-linguistic frameworks. In response to this difficulty for Baltic languages, Nau and Arkadiev (2015) have suggested a general framework for the glossing of the languages of that family. In the spirit of that work, the purpose of this article is to bring up some issues in interlinear glossed text (IGT) in Dene languages and give the rationale for possible solutions. We acknowledge that establishing a glossing standard for Dene, with close to 40 languages in the family, is a much more difficult, maybe even impossible task compared to doing so for the two languages of the Baltic family. But as a step towards doing so, we would like to continue the conversation about glossing Dene languages initiated by Holden (2013) and Kibrik (2019), in order to promote better analytical communication within our subfield and to linguists in general.
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    Questions and requests in North American Language
    (De Gruyter, 2023)
    Questions and requests are speech acts that call upon the hearer to do something. Questions typically ask for a verbal response, while requests usually elicit a non-verbal response. Both are important in language teaching and often among the first expressions that a learner acquires. Questions fall into two groups: polar questions, which can be answered with “yes” or “no”; and content questions, which require a more elaborate answer. Depending on the language, there are different types of requests, depending on factors such as identity of the addressee, politeness, etc. This paper provides an overview over the formation of different types of questions and requests in Indigenous languages of North America. Common strategies include intonation, (verbal) inflection or special markers. The paper closes with a brief discussion of how questions and requests can be used instead of one another.
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    Onomatopoeia in Upper Tanana Dene
    (De Gruyter, 2024) Lovick, Olga
    This chapter describes onomatopoeias in Upper Tanana, a Dene (Athabascan) language spoken in eastern interior Alaska (USA) and the western Yukon Territory (Canada).