Xinka Lexicography and Morphology

Research Results

Research has not been completed and will continue. In the following a description will be given as to the immediate results of the project rather than to specific aspects of morphology and the Xinka lexicon, since the latter are still preliminary.

The Linguistic Situation in the Xinka Area

The project on "Xinka lexicography and morphology" yields as one result information on the linguistic situation in Santa Rosa. As it is still possible to find some speakers we can correct the sad assertion of Xinka being totally extinct (see Fernandez 1938, Tujab 1987), although the official Guatemalan figures or the COPXIG’s estimates of about a hundred active speakers are to be considered an enormous exaggeration. This confusion has to be attributed to the misunderstanding of the term "hablante", which has lead to data stating an excessive numbers of speakers: thus an unpublished linguistic survey carried out by the Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco Marroquín in 1997 mentions as much as 9% of the total population of Guazacapán as speakers of Xinka (PLFM 1999: personal communication).

In fact, the linguistic situation is more discouraging: The few speakers we managed to find and work with in the course of this project were either very reluctant to share their knowledge, or they tried to commercialize it. The language knowledge of existing speakers has to be rated as extremely deficient and the documented data vary enormously in certain aspects. It needs to be mentioned that Xinka is not used for daily communication anymore. None of the speakers, including the individuals who did not agree to cooperate, has affirmed to practice conversation with any of the other speakers – each of them asserted not to know any further speakers. Moreover, all of them have stated to have learned their ability to talk "en lengua" from their grandparents or other elders, but not from their parents who already employed Spanish as the language of daily communication. From this we can conclude that there do not seem to be any speakers left who speak Xinka as their maternal language which supports the idea of Xinka being a dead rather than a threatened language.

The Data

Given the fact that all of my informants are already of a very advanced age and get tired of giving information very soon (i.e. generally after one hour), the interviews we managed to attain are fairly concise. Since there are no speakers who still actively communicate in Xinka among themselves, the methodological frame of documentation was limited to interviews and elicitation alone. Due to the linguistic situation and the degree of language competence of the speakers, it was neither possible to document the language in it’s cultural context, nor was it achieved to tape record longer coherent narrations. When explaining more complex topics the two informants we regarded as speakers usually switched back to Spanish.

In total, 40 hours of tape recorded interviews can be presented as the project’s substantial result. Regarding lexicography, a useful amount of lexical items was documented (see below). Lexical information was elicited in form of simple phrases. The informants also uttered entire sentences up to short prayers and very concise stories. In comparison to the data on Xinka that have been available for study up now (s.a.), the newly documentated material forms a valuable corpus for a linguistic analysis of Xinka morphology and morphosyntax which will exceed the information on the language structure accessible to date.

Xinka Lexicography

Since it would not suffice to add just another list of lexical items to the lexical data on Xinka that are already known, the study of the Xinka lexicon was aimed at comparing the newly documented data with the lexical entries of those word lists and vocabularies which have been available thus far (e.g. Calderón 1908; Maldonado de Matos ~1770; McQuown 1948; Schumann 1967). The lexical data documented in the course of the project do not exceed hitherto known data in number. However, the project data show that the information about certain words varies depending on the respective speaker, and that these forms may deviate from older data.

To present a rather simple example for the divergence, we may look at the varying lexical information in Xinka given for the spanish word "asiento" or "silla":

Informant 1	wapa
Informant 2	wapa
Informant 3	wapan

In this case, the lexical data show variation only in the last consonant which raises the question of whether wapa is a nominal word stem and the divergence in the last consonant can be attributed to morphological variation. Indeed, the suffix –n appears in the context of the first person singular possessive of inalienably possessed nouns (see below) and it is likely that the speaker referred directly to ’his seat’ by contesting with "mi silla" during the interview. However, the suffix - cannot be attributed to any other morphem identified thus far, but one could assume that it is the mispronounced suffix of the third person singular possessive of inalienably possessed nouns –j conveying the meaning "su silla". Although - has not been identified in the context of a possessive suffix, the project data suggest – at first glance – a morphological significance for the final consonant.

But if we compare the new data with the lexical entries for "silla" and "banco" in the vocabularies of Maldonado de Matos (~1770), McQuown (1948), and Schumann (1967)

Maldonado	guapa
McQuown	nuwapa
Schumann	wapár

this argumentation fails, since (1.) - appears repeatedly in final position and can therefore not be interpreted as a mistaken form of –j, (2.) the likely word stem wapa can be inflected with the prefix nu-, which is the first person singular possessive of alienably possessed nouns, and (3.) the suffix –r cannot be verified in any other context as it usually only appears in final position with loans (see Campbell 1972). Therefore, we can neither attribute a convincing morphological significance to the deviating final consonants, nor can we make a statement as to whether wapa is an alienably or inalienably possessed noun.

In the compilation of a Xinka lexicon we have to take into account that in general such divergences can be caused by several possible conditions. Divergence in the forms can as much be an indicator for regional (dialectal) variation as for a lack of reliability of the data, i.e. it can either be attributed to a declining language competence of the speakers and thus can be understood as the natural result of the language situation, or it can result from the documented data not being utterly representative. Therefore, a potential reconstruction of the Xinka lexem for "silla" requires a more profound analysis of the processes responsible for the deviations.

The present example reveals not only how much Xinka lexicography is dependent on morphological analysis and lexical reconstruction, but also shows the difficulty in the evaluation of the project data.

Xinka Morphology

Regarding Xinka morphosyntactic structure, the same methodological concerns that we pointed out for the reconstruction of the Xinka lexicon apply to the analysis of morphology. As a preliminary and by far not sufficient result we can hold the following features to be typologically relevant characteristics (at least) for the Xinka of Guazacapán:

Personal inflection of the verb is conditioned by the valence of the verb, i.e. whether it is an intransitive or a transitive verb, and by the tense/aspect of the action described. To mark the subject or agent of the verb, Xinka employs prefixes and suffixes, while the patient or object is represented by a free morpheme (pronoun) which follows the inflected verb (1.). The use of personal prefixes and suffixes depends basically on tense/aspect: In transitive verbs the agent is marked with a prefix to state a verbal action in the present/incompletive (2.), while suffixes are employed to mark the agent in the past/completive (1.).

(1.)	hin ka-ka nin neg hallar-2s 1s	no me hallaste
(2.)	an-pua tamatz’e’   1s-hacer    matate	yo hago matate

Intransitive verbs, on the other hand, mark the subject independently from tense/aspect by means of the free pronoun which is identical with the marker of the patient in a transitive phrase (3., 4.). The ergative pattern of grammatical relations resulting from this distribution, however, cannot be regarded as a significant feature of Xinka. If we compare the results from the project data with the information on the verbal system that can be reconstructed from the Maldonado grammar, we find intransitive verbs to be inflected with prefixes only - irrespective of tense/aspect (5., 6.).

(3.)	tiki    nin dormir  1s	yo duermo
(4.)	tiki-a      nin dormir-Past  1s	yo dormí
(5.)	an-màra 1s-descansar	yo descanso (Maldonado)
(6.)	an-màra 1s-descansar	yo descansé (Maldonado)

In transitive verbs the category of tense/aspect is thus marked indirectly with personal inflection. There is serveral degrees of "past" marked by temporal suffixes or particles following the inflected verb.

Concerning the morphology of nouns, nouns are inflected for the categories of possessive and plural. The plural is only inflected with animate, or more specifically human related nouns. Xinka is a head-marking language. To form the possessive, Xinka employs the same prefixes and suffixes used in the formation of the transitive verb. Suffixes mark nouns which are inalienably possessed (7.), while prefixes indicate possession in all other nouns (8.).

The project data show even more divergence regarding morphosyntactic structure than regarding lexical information. These divergences should not only be understood as signs of language death and limited reliability of the data, but do also reveal certain patterns which might be typologically relevant to language loss.

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