New Release: THE CADDO LANGUAGE
The Caddo Language
Announcing the release of The Caddo Language by the eminent linguist Wallace Chafe.
The Caddos once inhabited a vast area that is now included in eastern Texas and parts of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Their descendants have lived in southwestern Oklahoma since the middle of the nineteenth century. Their language is distantly related to Pawnee, Arikara, Witchita, and Kitsai within the Caddoan language family. Its polysynthetic verb morphology was described in an earlier work by Lynette Melnar.
Dr. Wallace Chafe
Dr. Wallace Chafe is an eminent American linguist, a leading authority on Native American linguistics, and a professor emeritus and research professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Dr. Chafe obtained his doctorate from Yale in 1958. From 1975 to 1986 he was the director of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages at the University of California, Berkeley. He later moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, and became professor emeritus at UCSB in 1991.
Dr. Chafe is an influential scholar in indigenous languages of the Americas, notably Iroquoian and Caddoan languages, in discourse analysis and psycholinguistics, and also prosody of speech. He is a cognitivist; he considers semantics to be a basic component of language. Together with Johanna Nichols, he edited a seminal volume on evidentiality in language in 1986. He supports the Seneca’s bilingual education program and conducted a major National Science Foundation-funded study of Seneca discourse. A Symposium in Honor of Wallace Chafe was held in 2005 at the Louvain Institute in Belgium, recognizing his seminal contributions to the preservation of indigenous languages. And in 2008, he received the Constantine Panunzio Distinguished Emeriti Award.
