This paper is an initial descriptive analysis of noun phrases in Southern Ute. This analysis begins with a brief sociolinguistic introduction to the Southern Ute tribe located in southwestern Colorado. Next Southern Ute phonemes are presented in the current official tribal orthography and the International Phonetic Alphabet. Various verb phrases are presented to develop a basic understanding of word order in Southern Ute. The internal structure of nouns is discussed followed by examples and discussions of various noun phrases. This paper is a springboard for further analysis of the Southern Ute language.

This paper is a study of reported speech in Nez Perce (Sahaptian), an endangered language presently spoken in the southern Columbia Plateau region of western North America. This paper will focus on the use of reported speech in Nez Perce narrative to determine 1) the range and types of reported speech registers, and 2) discern how such reported speech registers might be patterned so as to indicate their cultural functions.

In this paper I present data from the Ehe dialect of Kurripako on nominal possessives. I explore different possessive paradigms in order to fully explain the phenomena and draw on the fields of morphology, phonology and semantics to understand the data.

Up to this point, the Aymara verb has been analyzed as a matrix of tense and evidentiality (i.e. how the speaker came to know of an event). Under this analysis, the morphology is defective in two regards. It collapses the distant past and the present/near past for non-personal knowledge, and there is no evidentiality distinction for the future form. Furthermore, there are significant ‘exceptions’ to the uses of these forms. A more elegant, non-defective analysis without ‘exceptions’ is possible if we recognize that the previous analyses have imposed Indo-European categories onto a language that does not give precedence to them. Whereas most Indo-European languages are more concerned with locating an event in time, Aymara prioritizes how much responsibility a speaker assumes for the information in a speech act. Even for instances when time is the most salient piece of information, previous studies have neglected to incorporate the Aymara conception of time. In contrast to a Western view, in which the speaker conceptually looks faces forward toward the future, the Aymara place the past in front of the speaker, because it is ‘visible’. The unknown, unseen future lies behind the speaker. This construal of the unknowable future fits into the Aymara focus on evidentiality. Further investigation shows that Aymara verbs reflect four grades of how sure a speaker is of the information that he or she reports. The passage of time is simply the prototype of any of a number of reasons for which a speaker may choose to accept less responsibility. Other reasons include hearsay, surprise, and intoxication. This study suggests a new approach to analyzing tense, aspect, and modality in languages such as Aymara.