The Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California is a federally recognized tribe that seeks to revitalize its Washoe language through the Washiw Wagayay Manal (WWM) language program. The Washoe or "Washo" language is a severely endangered indigenous language. To date most speakers are elderly and it is believed that there are twenty or less fluent speakers. Despite the odds, the WWM seeks to proliferate the Washoe language and re-integrate Washoe where it once thrived--in the community.

This thesis is based on multiple research trips to Nevada where I attended weekly language classes and interviewed WWM students, staff and teachers, Washoe community members and professional linguists. My research is a linguistic history of Washoe tribal members, descendants and their drive to save theirs and their ancestors' language. The examination includes analysis on the colonization of the Washoe language, a history of Washoe linguistic work, a review of Washoe language ideologies, a history of the once thriving Washoe Immersion School, as well as an account of current WWM language revitalization methods and tools. Included is an analysis of heterographia (multiple orthographies) and community response to program methods.

It is clear the Washoe people value their heritage language. They see it as an inherently connected extension of their being and identity. Currently, however, the issue at hand is pondering how best to endeavor language revitalization. Community members and the WWM are at a critical juncture on determining best practices. There is a great deal of energy on the topic with a call for reform and a new progressive approach to challenge language death. In the face of language death, the Washoe people have taken a proactive stance.

Grammatical voice is the thematic relationship between a verb and its arguments; for example, a transitive active verb has an agent subject and a patient object, while a passive verb has a patient subject. As an ergative language with frequent use of passive voice and a relatively rare antipassive, the Mayan language Q’anjob’al offers evidence against the typological claim that ergative languages tend to use antipassive more productively than passive. In addition to passive and antipassive, Q’anjob’al argument structure can be affected by agent focus and incorporating morphology. While these operations typically do not involve a change in the number of participants, unlike passive and antipassive, they do alter the syntactic realization of the participants and act as discourse strategies to highlight or background entities. I propose that the non-canonical alignment of the transitive agent with absolutive agreement seen in antipassive and incorporating constructions is highly marked, accounting for their relative rarity.

Passive voice is used in Q'anjob'al when the semantic patient outranks the agent in proximity, a dimension encompassing animacy, definiteness, and discourse prominance. Assigning a structurally superior argument position to a less prominant argument than the internal argument in a transitive sentence is also marked, resulting in the preference for passive structures in such cases.

Incorporation, in which a transitive verb and its object combine to form an intransitive verb, is another option in Q'anjob'al to background the patient, an alternative to antipassive and agent focus. Q'anjob'al incorporation appears to involve a piece of structure larger than the nominal head often assumed to be involved in incorporation, as modification of the incorporated nominal by adjectives and conjunction is possible. Like antipassive, incorporation aligns the transitive agent with absolutive agreement and is relatively rare; however, incorporation differs from antipassive in that it never changes the meaning of the verb root, has no lexical restrictions, and usually does not occur with the omission of an argument.

Agent focus, a construction attested in many Mayan languages in which the verb takes special morphology when the subject of a transitive clause is focused, is an alternative strategy when the patient is more proximate than the agent. Though Q'anjob'al agent focus has sometimes been described as a type of antipassive, it differs from antipassive in that there is no case shift and no reduction in valence. The syntax of agent focus is best represented as a biclausal structure with a null copula in the matrix clause.

Passive and agent focus are less marked in Q'anjob'al, and therefore occur more frequently, than antipassive and incorporation because of the following features they share: preservation of the structural position of the internal argument, canonical alignment of the patient argument with absolutive case, no restrictions on the transitive verbs on which they may appear, and no unpredictable changes in meaning.

Langdon was a talented and generous mentor to her students, as well as to students from elsewhere who crossed her doorstep. Her door was always open to them, and she never gave the impression that she needed to be doing something else other than talking to them. Her students were welcome in her home, and she and her husband and daughter maintained lifelong friendships with them. It was through her leadership that the Yuman languages became one of the best-studied language families in California, with students doing dissertations and other research on the various languages in that family under Margaret's tutelage, and later with the guidance of her own students turned professors. Langdon's students have become professors in most of the major universities of the West. Langdon is survived by her daughter, Loni Langdon of Bishop, California, by a sister in Belgium, and by the many students and colleagues who held her beloved.

This dissertation offers a definition of “disanaphor morphemes.” I claim that all disanaphor morphemes are deep anaphors indicating a non-identity relationship between the DP that contains them and their antecedent. I listed three characteristics that the disanaphor DPs have, they select an antecedent from the context, they share a common property with their antecedent and they are distinct from their antecedent.

I argue that disanaphors morphemes are present in different languages and I show how to conceive a single core meaning for elements that present what superficially seem to be two meanings (distinct and distinct kind), and how to pragmatically derive a third meaning (additional). Furthermore, I explore the extent to which a language that displays this apparent homophony also shares the same core meaning identified in other/else through an analysis of San Sebasti�n del Monte Mixtec (SSM).

An important contribution of this dissertation is its focus on a syntactic analysis of other/altro, which examines its different word orders within the DP and on how numerals interact with it, two questions that still lack a unified answer (Cinque 2016, Lechner 2010, Thomas 2011). I claim that disanaphor morphemes are located in two positions, one below the numeral projection but above the adjectival projection, and one above the numeral projection but below determiners and Q-adjectives. I demonstrate that each position in English is associated with a specific reading, depending on what the disanaphor other modifies. I also propose that the raising of other from its original position to the higher position is obligatory in some languages, as for example in Teramano, Abruzzese Italian and in other varieties of Italian. Moreover, I propose that the additive reading is not part of the meaning of other but that it can be triggered by the context, thus making other different from more. I then claim that the morpheme ga in SSM is a disanaphor morpheme when occurring DP-internally, and I demonstrate that the characteristics and distribution I proposed for disanaphors in Italian and English still holds for ga.

The secondary goal of this dissertation is to explain the occurrence of ga VP-internally, when it does not function as a disanaphor morpheme. VP-internally, ga can function as an additive morpheme or as a comparative morpheme, similar to English more. I offer a detailed description of the three comparative constructions in SSM: particle comparatives, locative comparatives and conjoined comparatives. I set this description within the typological claims made by Stassen (1985) and the more recent theoretical literature on comparatives; in so doing, I offered the argument that conjoined comparatives can co-occur with gradable predicates and that we need to expand both our typology as well as our analysis. I focused specifically on conjoined comparatives in SSM and I offered a possible analysis.

Finally, this dissertation offers a wider description of the grammar of SSM. This includes the language's phonology, word order, interrogatives, negation, adverbs, classifiers, aspects, and relative clauses among other topics in an overview of the linguistic features of the language. In particular I focused on those aspects of the language that are relevant for the determiner phrase and comparative constructions.