File:Tanya Slavin, The structure of the verb stem in Oji-Cree, SOAS, University of London.webm

This seminar titled "The structure of the verb stem in Oji-Cree (an Algonquian language spoken in Canada)" was given by Tanya Slavin as part of the Linguistics Department Seminar Series at SOAS, University of London on 7 October 2014.

The Algonquian verb stem is traditionally described as consisting of a template of three elements, identified by their position relative to each other: initial, medial and final (following the description by Bloomfield (1946, 1958, 1962) uniformly adopted by subsequent scholarship). However, in recent years it's being recognized more and more widely that that templatic approach does not adequately describe either the relation between stem components or the range of possible stem types. This talk is part of a larger project to characterize the relation between stem components beyond the traditional templatic approach, based on large amounts of original data. Focusing on Oji-Cree, an under-described dialect of Ojibwe, an Algonquian language spoken in Canada, I will discuss two constructions that have not received adequate attention in the literature: bi-partite stems (1) and stems that involve an incorporation of a possessed noun (2).