UC San Diego

Torres Martinez Desert (TMD) Cahuilla is variety of the Desert dialect of Cahuilla, a critically endangered language, now spoken only by a few elderly speakers living on and near the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indian Reservation located near Thermal, California in the Western- Colorado Desert region. This dissertation contributes to prior documentation on Cahuilla by presenting novel data from contemporary speakers of the language, including data from conversations and other speech genres, that were previously under-documented. This dissertation also compares archival data from 50 years prior to the TMD Cahuilla datacollected for this study to investigate whether there have been changes to the synchronic grammar, providing insight into the rarely examined dynamics of language change. Chapter 1 begins with an overview of Cahuilla, its speakers, previous documentation, and information about the study, as well as current efforts to revitalize the language. Chapter 2 provides a description of the segmental phonology, including a comparison of previous phonological inventories and orthographies used within the last century of documentation. Chapter 3 discusses the phonotactic restrictions that govern much of the phonology, while Chapter 4 presents several aspects suprasegmental phonology of the language; stress and intonation. In particular, Chapter 4 provides phonological and phonetic criteria for positing primary stress in the TMD Cahuilla, however, no phonological or phonetic criteria could be established to posit secondary stress, a topic which has been extensively discussed in prior literature. Chapter 5 provides an overview of the morphology of nouns and verbs in TMD Cahuilla providing templates for each, as well as paradigms of fully inflected nouns and verbs. Finally, Chapter 6 discusses reduplication, a process that involves complex morphophonological processes in TMD Cahuilla, as well as other varieties of Cahuilla. Building upon prior research on Cahuilla, this dissertation provides a detailed and precise description of several salient topics in the grammar that will be useful to those studying other Uto-Aztecan languages, as well as language typologists, and Cahuilla community members and scholars looking to leverage the data from this study for language reclamation and revitalization and purposes.