Nominal Contact in Michif

Carrie Gillon is Research Associate at the University of Manitoba, where she works on the syntax and semantics of understudied languages, particularly on the universality of certain syntactic structures. She has carried out research on a range of languages from different language families, including Squamish, Halkomelem, and Straits (Salish), Inuktitut (Eskimo-Aleut), Innu-aimun (Algonquian), Michif (Algonquian/French mixed language), Quechan (Yumana), Lithuanian (Baltic), and Turkish (Turkic).Nicole Rosen is Associate Professor and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Language Interactions at the University of Manitoba. Her research focuses on the effects of language contact, particularly in the languages spoken in the Canadian Prairies. She is particularly interested in enclave and language transfer effects from minority languages on English and French, focusing on the sociophonetic level, and has created several large corpora of Prairies languages to study these effects. She is also interested in making linguistic research more accessible to the public and is currently working on a project seeking to enhance the visualization of linguistic variation and change.

• General prefaceAcknowledgementsList of figures and tablesList of abbreviationsPronunciation guide: A note on Michif orthography1: Introduction2: Mass/count3: Plurality4: Gender5: Articles6: Demonstratives7: Status of the category 'mixed language'Appendix A: Plains Cree verbal morphologyAppendix B: Michif verbal morphologyReferencesIndex

... a refreshingly detailed examination of an important area of mixed-language grammar, teasing out semantic nuances (such as mass versus count, and coercion from one to the other) that most languages do not mark morphologically, and which consequently most grammar descriptions are liable to ignore. Likewise we receive an incisive exposition of the differences between the formally essentially identical, but functionally quite divergent, definite-article systems of Michif and French. We learn much from this book that is not easily discoverable from other sources, and it is reinforced with many dozens of reliable examples direct from a first-language speaker.