Purepecha, a Polysynthetic but Predominantly Dependent-Marking Language

Keywords: Purepecha, locative suffixes, dependent marking, head attraction, head marking, pronominal enclitics, Purepecha, a Polysynthetic but Predominantly Dependent-Marking Language

Purepecha (language isolate, Mexico) has one relevant characteristic that leads to identifying it as a polysynthetic language: productive verbal morphology (in particular locative suffixes). Purepecha is a predominantly dependent-marking language, as its pronominal markers are enclitics, generally second position enclitics. But, in some contexts Purepecha shows head-marking characteristics. Today, pronominal enclitics exhibit variation, tending to move to the rightmost position in the clause; they may encliticize to the predicate itself, showing a head-attraction or polypersonalism strategy and making Purepecha more polysynthetic. But this language lacks noun incorporation. Purepecha has three types of non-finite clause: two subordinate clauses (non-finite complement clauses and purpose clauses) and a syntactically independent clause (the chain-medial clause). This seemingly inconsistent situation (characterized by a correlation of different properties, some of which have not been identified as polysynthetic) calls for addressing the typological classification of Purepecha among the polysynthetic languages.

Introduction

FORTESCUE (1994) lists various traits that tend to cluster together to give rise to a polysynthetic language, but says that they are not necessarily all attested in a single language. These include noun incorporation, a large inventory of bound morphemes, numerous morphological slots, the verb constituting a clause, head marking, pronominal markers on verbs, and adverbial elements integrated into verbs. In the same framework, Evans and Sasse (2002) propose a definition that reflects the correlation of different typological features and the possibility that languages without incorporation and pronominal markers on verbs can also be considered polysynthetic. They claim that Essentially, then, a prototypical polysynthetic language is one in which it is possible, in a single word, to use processes of morphological composition to encode information about both the predicate and all its arguments, for all major clause types to a level of specificity, allowing this word to serve alone as a freestanding utterance without reliance on context. (2002: 3) Mithun (2009: 15) gave emphasis to the correlation of various features and noted that etymologically, the term 'polysynthesis' refers simply to multiple morphemes per word, but it remains to be seen what other properties might be crucial for predicting additional characteristics. From a different and restrictive perspective, according to Baker (1996: 19), polysynthesis is defined by noun incorporation and verb agreement. Taking account of these perspectives is relevant to characterizing the correlation of properties that lead us to identify a polysynthetic language and to defining the limits within which a specific language must fall in order to be polysynthetic. This leads us to ask how far a specific language is polysynthetic: the goal of this chapter is to apply this question to the case of Purepecha.

The structure of Purepecha demonstrates that the fundamental features typically associated with polysynthesis-that is, elaborate verbal morphology, holophrasis, head marking, and noun incorporation-do not need to coexist. Purepecha is characterized by the first two, as illustrated in (1a). In particular, Purepecha has a large inventory of locative suffixes, various suffixes for voice changes, and a third person plural object suffix. But, in contrast with this productivity, Purepecha has less-developed directional, desiderative, and adverbial suffixes. The presence of various types of suffixes constitutes a significant characteristic that allows the building of holophrasis, as illustrated in (1a). Various characteristics of the derivational suffixes lead us to argue that they are lexical suffixes and not possible traces of noun incorporation. Purepecha is predominantly a dependent-marking language, as its pronominal markers are enclitics, generally second position enclitics, as illustrated in (1b). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2017

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In three contexts, Purepecha shows head marking. In the first, the head marking is the consequence of the form of the pronouns: the third person singular is always unmarked, and the first person singular is unmarked when it appears with the assertive mood (that has the form -ka for speech act participants, codified as 1/2), as illustrated in (2a). In the second context, the third person plural object marker is a verbal suffix that only occurs in the verb (2a). In the third context, the applicative suffix encodes a recipient or the possessor of the entity introduced as the object (external possession); this suffix appears exclusively within the verb, as in (2b). Moreover, pronominal enclitics display the development of a head-attraction strategy in which they tend to move to the rightmost position in the clause and may encliticize to the predicate itself.

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Next, Purepecha entirely lacks the fourth feature, that is, noun incorporation. Lastly, Purepecha has developed the use of non-finite clauses in three contexts: two subordinate clauses (non-finite complement clauses and purpose clauses) and a syntactically independent clause (the chain-medial clause). In these three contexts, the verb may be marked by the third person plural object suffix -a, and in one, the chain-medial clause, the pronominal enclitics may be attached to the verb. Because of this seemingly inconsistent situation, Baker would exclude Purepecha as a polysynthetic language, as it lacks noun incorporation and head marking, the two prototypical criteria in his view. But as defined by Fortescue, Evans and Sasse, or Mithun, Purepecha is polysynthetic. However, the correlation of these properties, some of which have not been identified as polysynthetic, calls for addressing the typological classification of Purepecha among the polysynthetic languages. Exploring the sentential vs. non-sentential typology proposed by Drossard (1997: 252), I will argue that Purepecha is a polysynthetic language located Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2017 somewhere in between the sentential and non-sentential types, with tendencies toward the sentential type.

The chapter is organized as follows. In Section 32.2, I briefly sketch the basic typological characteristics of Purepecha. In Section 32.3, I discuss the predominantly dependentmarking characteristics of Purepecha (32.3.1), showing contexts that reveal headmarking constructions (32.3.2) and head attraction (32.3.3). In Section 32.4 I illustrate its elaborate verbal morphology, contrasting the large inventory of locative suffixes (32.4.1) and the less developed inventory of other types of suffixes (32.4.2). In Section 32.5, I describe three types of non-finite clause in Purepecha. Finally, in Section 32.6, I review the different characteristics described in this chapter and assess to what extent Purepecha is polysynthetic, taking into account especially the sentential vs. nonsentential typology proposed by Drossard (1997: 252).

Basic Typological Characteristics of Purepecha

Purepecha (formerly known as Tarascan) is classified as a language isolate and is spoken in the state of Michoacán in western Mexico by approximately 110,000 people (Chamoreau 2009(Chamoreau , 2012)). The classification of Purepecha as a part of the Mesoamerican linguistic area is still debated, but generally it is not classified as a Mesoamerican language, as it shows very few signature Mesoamerican characteristics (Smith-Stark 1994).

Purepecha has nominative-accusative alignment, and is a case-marking language in which the nominal subject has no overt marker. The object is generally marked by the objective case marker -ni. This morpheme encodes the object of a transitive verb, such as misitu-ni 'the cat' in (3), and both objects of a ditransitive verb, such as inte-ni wantantskwa-ni and Puki-ni, in (4). The presence or absence of the object case marker depends on different hierarchies: (i) the inherent semantic properties of the referent (human, animate); (ii) properties related to grammatical features (definite, count noun vs. mass noun, generic vs. specific, etc.); and (iii) pragmatic strategies (topic, focus) (Chamoreau 2009). The presence of the objective case marker -ni generally indicates that the noun phrase is characterized as individuated. 2010), it exhibits neutral alignment for flagging, that is, the objective case marker -ni is the same for the patient of a transitive verb and the patient and the recipient of a ditransitive verb, as illustrated in (3) and (4), and for syntactic processes such as topicality, focus, interclausal co-reference control, and relativization. But Purepecha displays secundative alignment for accessibility to voice change: in other words, the recipient of the ditransitive verb aligns with the object of the transitive verb in reflexive, reciprocal, passive, and antipassive constructions, as shown in (5a) for the passive construction. Example (5b) is ungrammatical because the patient of the ditransitive verb cannot become the subject of the passive construction.

(5) Purepecha displays the predominance of dependent marking, for example with the pronominal enclitic, as in (1b), and the genitive suffix, as illustrated in ( 6) and ( 7).

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Purepecha is basically a SV and SVO constituent order language, as illustrated by examples (3) and ( 4). This order is the basic order in the region of Lake Patzcuaro (Capistrán 2002, Chamoreau 2009: 55-8). Other orders indicate specific pragmatic properties. Studies of constituent order in the other regions do not as yet exist. However, Purepecha exhibits some traits of a SOV language: (i) tense, aspect, irrealis and modal markers following the verb; (ii) postpositions; (iii) only suffixes; (iv) only enclitics; (v) case markers; (vi) main verbs preceding inflected auxiliaries; and (vii) variation of the position of head noun in noun phrase that reveals that final head noun precedes non final head noun (compare examples ( 6) and ( 7)). SVO and SOV constituent orders were attested in the sixteenth century, and the former has gradually increased since then. The change is PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2017 probably due to areal contact. Prior to the Conquest there were speakers of other languages in this territory, mostly Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan family) and Otomi (Otopamean family), two languages with verb-initial structure. The change probably began under the influence of these languages; Spanish, a SVO language, continued the process, for example by introducing prepositions (Chamoreau 2007).

In Purepecha, the different morphemes that attach to the verb stem are always suffixed. There are two types of stems: a simple stem and a bipartite stem. The stems end in a vowel and generally receive the accent on this vowel, that is, the accent indicates the morphological end of the stem, as illustrated in (8a) and (8b) by a monosyllabic root and in (8c) by disyllabic roots.

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These simple stems directly accept the inflectional suffixes of third person plural object, tense, aspect, irrealis, and mood, as illustrated in (9) by the verb ewa 'take' to which the third person plural object -a, the irrealis -a, and the assertive mood for speech act participants (codified as 1/2) -ka are suffixed. In (10), the non-finite suffix -ni is directly suffixed to the root kara 'write'. Example (10) also illustrates the second type, the bipartite stem (DeLancey 1999). These stems are constituted by two bound forms: a root and a suffix. In Purepecha, it is easy to distinguish the verbal root and the derivational element because the latter is not accented and is suffixed to the former. In (10) the root mi-always requires a morpheme before an inflectional suffix. This may be a locative morpheme, as in (11a) and ( 11b), but it is generally an obligatory suffix whose meaning is not always easy to determinate but may change the meaning of the root, as shown in (11c) and (11d). This is called a formative suffix (Chamoreau 2009: 92-6;Friedrich 1971: 4;Monzón 2004: 53-61). In Purepecha, the verbal template has a range of potential slots, most of which need not be filled. The template is divided into three main sections; from left to right the order is: stem (slot +1); derivational morphemes, more than seventy suffixes (from slot +2 to slot +7 in table 1); and flectional morphemes, fifteen suffixes (from slot +8 to slot +12 in Table 32.3). The first section, the stem, has already been introduced: it may be constituted by a simple stem or a bipartite stem. The other two sections have slots that appear in a rigid order, as illustrated in Table 32.1. Purepecha is a predominantly dependent-marking language, as its pronominal markers are enclitics, generally second position enclitics (Section 32.3.1). But in three types of contexts, Purepecha shows features of a head-marking language. In the first type of context, the head-marking characteristic is the consequence of the form of the pronouns: the third person singular is unmarked, and the first person singular may be unmarked. In the second type of context, the third person plural object is a suffix that occurs only in the verb. In the third type of context, the applicative suffix appears exclusively within the verb and encodes a recipient or a possessor (Section 32.3.2). In other contexts, Purepecha shows a head-attraction strategy, as pronominal enclitics have recently begun to appear in a new position, depending on the type of their grammatical host; that is, the enclitics are associated with words that function as the syntactic predicate of the clause (Section 32.3.3). This position makes Purepecha more polysynthetic, as it develops polypersonalism.

Dependent-marking language

Subject and object pronouns are expressed by pronominal enclitics. Table 32.2 presents the two paradigms of pronominal enclitics, namely the subject and object enclitics.

This language possesses only enclitics and combines different types-fixed and floating, pronominal and non-pronominal (Chamoreau 2014). Pronominal enclitics are illustrated by example ( 12) and non-pronominal discourse enclitics by example (13). Both are fixed second-position enclitics. By contrast, adverbial non-pronominal enclitics have a floating position, as in example ( 14). It has accented independent pronouns (see the paradigm in Table 32.3). They are used to introduce or to emphasize a referent, as illustrated in example ( 15).

(15)

For pronominal enclitics, the second position is their unmarked and more frequent position (see Chamoreau 2014). The pronominal enclitic is used to indicate that the referent functions either as the subject of a clause, as illustrated by =ksï in ( 16) in an independent clause, or as the object of a clause, as illustrated by =kini in (17) in a dependent clause, whatever the valency of the verb (Chamoreau 2009). In this position, non-pronominal enclitics may be found, as in the case of =taru in ( 16). One of the functions of a second-position enclitic is to delimit the beginning of a clause, either an independent clause, as in ( 16), or a dependent clause, as in ( 17). Second-position pronominal enclitics have a fixed position within a clause regardless of the grammatical class of their host. A great variety of hosts is attested; the list below is organized by frequency of the element that functions as host for second-position enclitics (see Table 32.4). Adverbs, subordinators, and verbs are the three most frequent constituents that function as hosts for second-position pronominal enclitics. The high frequency of the subordinator as host shows that in dependent clauses, pronominal enclitics almost always attach after this element. At the bottom of the list, postposition and coordinating conjunctions almost never function as possible hosts.

-frequent

Different enclitic strings, also known as clitic clusters, are possible in Purepecha.

-two non-pronominal enclitics, as in ( 18)

-one non-pronominal and one pronominal enclitic, as in ( 16)

-two non-pronominal enclitics and one pronominal enclitic, as in ( 19).

(

) (19) 18
Enclitic strings have a strict internal order: the non-pronominal enclitic precedes the pronominal enclitic as illustrated in (19). However, two non-pronominal fixed enclitics, the focus =sï and the evidential =na, generally appear at the end of the string (except with first person singular that appears after the focus =xï). In the sixteenth century, the order was the reverse, that is, =pronominal =non-pronominal. Today, the fixed position shows some signs of weakening. Non-pronominal enclitics keep their position, while pronominal enclitics exhibit variation, tending to move to the right position in the clause, and may encliticize to the predicate itself (see Section 32.3.3).

Contexts of head-marking characteristics

Third person singular is always unmarked regardless of the mood, in assertive mood, as illustrated in (20), in interrogative mood, as shown in (21), and in subjunctive mood, as illustrated in (22). In (20c), (21c), and (22c), the absence of pronominal marker is understood as the third person singular. The consequence is that Purepecha shows head marking or polypersonalism with third person in all moods and with first person in the assertive mood. The other context in which Purepecha displays head-marking behavior is with the third person plural object suffix. This is the unique suffix for pronominal encoding that occurs exclusively in the verb. The suffix -a occurs only for third person plural when it functions as the object of the clause, as illustrated in ( 23).

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The presence of -a is not obligatory when the object is the third person plural. The presence or absence of the object suffix depends on the way the referent of the noun is conceived. When the noun refers to various entities that can be individuated, the suffix is used as in (24a), but when the same entities are understood as unindividuated, the suffix does not appear, as illustrated in (24b) (Chamoreau 2009: 84-91). In the context of body parts or objects that always function in pairs (eyes, ears, legs, arms, etc.), the noun generally is not marked by the -echa marker but the suffix -a is attached to the verb, as in ( 25). This suffix is not a marker of agreement of a noun in the plural, in the sense that its presence is not obligatory.

(

) 24
(25)

In Purepecha, there are two suffixes for applicative voice: -chi for speech act participants (1/2) and -ku for the other participants. The use of applicative voice allows the introduction of the recipient or the beneficiary as illustrated in (26a). In (26b), two interpretations are possible: the applicative suffix introduces the beneficiary or the possessor of the entity expressed as second argument wichu-ni (external possession). To sum up: Purepecha is a predominantly dependent-marking language, as the arguments are coded as second-position enclitics (see Section 32.3.1). But it shows head marking or polypersonalism with the unmarked third person singular form and the first person singular form in the assertive mood. This head-marking characteristic is also attested with third person plural object suffix codified within the verb and when a suffix of applicative voice is attested.

Head attraction

In Purepecha, pronominal enclitics have recently begun to appear in a new position, after the syntactic predicate of the clause, frequently a verb. For methodological reasons, I treat predicate enclitics as different from verbs in first position that are hosts for secondposition pronominal enclitics. In Table 32.4, verbs are one of the three most frequent constituents that function as the host of second-position pronominal enclitics. This is not a surprise in the case of verbs, as it is a well-known feature cross-linguistically (Givón 2011a: 182; Heine and Song 2011). But it is new in Purepecha: in the sixteenth century, verbs were generally not positioned at the beginning of a clause (Chamoreau 2014). The high frequency of verbs as hosts of second-position enclitics is significant in a narrative with chain-medial clauses, which contain non-finite clauses with referential continuity; these chain-medial clauses are only constituted by predicates that express a succession of events or indicate overlapping events, as illustrated by example (27) (see Section 32.5 and Chamoreau 2016). The verb occurs more frequently in first position, and becomes a "frequent candidate to host second-position clitics" (Givón 2011: 190). In this context, generally only the pronominal enclitic that functions as subject is expressed. In the new strategy, enclitics are attached to the end of the predicate after the aspect, tense, and irrealis mood markers. This is also a fixed position, but what has changed is that predicates need not appear in the first position of the clause, but can appear in any position. This movement to the right, from second-position enclitic to predicate enclitic, occurs only with pronominal enclitics. The host is chosen for its syntactic and pragmatic properties, and is frequently the predicate itself, as illustrated by example (28), or in a few cases the last element before the predicate, when it is an adverb or a negation, as in ( 29).

(28) (29)

Five new morphosyntactic possibilities for the new strategy have been identified. Going from the most frequent strategy to the least frequent, these are:

1. After the predicate: this is more frequent for the subject, as in (28), than for the object, as in (30). 2. Pronominal agreement: independent pronoun and enclitic after the predicate, as in (31). 3. Repetition of the enclitic that functions as the subject (in the same clause): as the second-position enclitic and after the predicate (32). For the object, this strategy has not been found to occur. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2017 4. Pronominal agreement: independent pronoun, second-position enclitic, and enclitic after the predicate, as in (33). This strategy has been found for the subject, never for the object. 5. After an element that occurs before the predicate: generally negation ( 29), but there are two examples with an adverb (34). This strategy has been found for the subject, never for the object. function as the subject and 472 as the object. This result shows that the majority of the clauses are intransitive or transitive with a third person object. In this corpus, only 228 pronominal enclitics, or 5.5 percent, were not found in the second position. The predicate enclitic is very infrequent: 209 of these enclitics function as the subject and 19 as the object. Another finding is that 216 enclitics occur in main clauses, 12 in dependent clauses. In dependent clauses, the referent frequently attaches after the subordinator. Table 32.5 displays the different strategies for codifying referents (outside the nominal codification). These are generally expressed by a pronominal enclitic, and only very infrequently by an independent pronoun (line g). The non-predicate enclitic position accounts for 94.5 percent of the occurrences in only three types of position, namely (a), (e), and (g). Conversely, the predicate enclitic only accounts for 5.5 percent, and in five types of position, (b), (c), (d), (f), and (h). Table 32.5 also shows the current variation in the codification of referents in particular as enclitics. The development of the predicate enclitic explains this variation. Another consequence is an increase in the contexts in which independent pronouns are used. In the sixteenth century, independent pronouns were infrequent (Chamoreau 2014).

-frequent

The analysis of the corpus identifies some specific texts in which the use of predicate enclitics (not in second position) is more frequent. These texts display two types of pragmatic and sociolinguistic characteristics. On the one hand, there are autobiographical stories or narratives with only one or two referents, that is, narratives in which the main referent has a very prominent role and exhibits high continuity. On the

(p. 681)
other hand, texts with a frequent use of predicate enclitics are narrated by bilingual speakers who have had at least an intermediate-level school education or who use Spanish more than Purepecha in everyday communication. There are three representative texts. The first text is an autobiographical story told by a Purepecha speaker who uses Purepecha in everyday communication (see Chamoreau 2012 for more details). Predicate enclitics represent 18 percent of total enclitic occurrences. The second story is told by a man from Arantepacua who has studied in Morelia and has responsibilities in his village; he uses Spanish more than Purepecha. In his account of a traditional legend, 14 percent of the occurrences are predicate enclitics. The third example is an autobiographical story by a woman who lives in Mexico City (story cited by Capistrán 2004). In this text, 36 percent of the occurrences are predicate enclitics.

How has this variation in pronominal enclitics become possible? Two related hypotheses may be advanced to answer this question. The first hypothesis for explaining change in predicate position and its restriction to pronominal enclitics is that pronominal enclitics choose their hosts because of their syntactic and discourse properties, exhibiting head attraction (see Haig 2008 for Western Iranian languages). Syntactic predicates generally express the main information. Cases of head attraction for pronominal enclitics are described in the literature for Iranian languages (Haig 2008) and Romance languages (Vincent 2001). In earlier stages, ancient Iranian and Latin possessed pronominal second-position clitics. Today, Persian and Romance languages have pronominal markers placed close to the verb, usually within the verb phrase. This shift was analyzed by Haig (2008) as a case of attraction to the verb, that is, to the head that governs pronominal markers. In Purepecha, the process began centuries ago when the pronominal enclitics moved to the end of the second-position enclitic string (see Section 32.3.1 and Chamoreau 2014). This process allowed the pronominal enclitics to move to the last position and to gain more freedom to move. The second hypothesis is based on analysis of characteristics of the speakers who narrated the texts with more frequent predicate positions: Spanish grammatical constructions may influence the change of position of pronominal enclitics in Purepecha (Chamoreau 2007(Chamoreau , 2012)). Spanish expresses the referents close to the verb as clitics or in the flexion associated with tense and mood (Vincent 2001). Almost all Purepecha speakers are bilingual, speaking at least Purepecha and Spanish. Spanish is the language of prestige, linked to education, a better standard of living, oral and written media, religion, administration, commerce, and work. The speakers who narrated these texts use Spanish more frequently in everyday conversation.

In short, Purepecha exhibits variations in position, distribution (predicate), frequency (increase in pronominal enclitics attached to the verb), and grammatical function (from clause delimitation to marking the predicate in whatever position). These variations are the consequences of new tendencies that give more relevance to predicates, showing head attraction and making Purepecha more polysynthetic as it displays polypersonalism in these contexts, as illustrated in Sections 32.3.2 for head marking and 32.3.3 for head attraction. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2017

Verbal Morphology

One of the most frequently described characteristics of polysynthetic languages is the combining of bound morphemes with the verb (Evans and Sasse 2002, Drossard 2002, Fortescue 1994, Mithun 2009). In Purepecha, locative suffixes are particularly numerous; this is the wider class of derivational suffixes. Other types of derivational suffixes are less developed: there are two directional suffixes, two desiderative suffixes, five adverbial suffixes, three causative suffixes and five suffixes for voice change (as illustrated in Table 32.1).

Locative suffixes

Between thirty and fifty morphemes belong to the class of locative suffixes. Friedrich lists thirty-two (1971: 15-16), and Monzón has studied forty-six (2004: 67). This variation may be due to dialectal differences. In Table 32.6, I present the thirty suffixes attested in Jaracuaro.

In Purepecha, these locative suffixes are lexical suffixes that exhibit characteristics similar to those described by Mithun (1997Mithun ( , 2009) ) for the lexical affixes of the Salishan languages. The locative suffixes constitute a closed paradigm of exclusively dependent morphemes that may suffix to the verbal stem (see Table 32.6). They have a lexical meaning basically related to spatial concepts, which include parts used for the body, for the majority of the suffixes.

The class of locative suffixes breaks down into two semantic subclasses. The first consists of morphemes that indicate a specific physical area (outside the body), for example in (35a) -nu 'patio', in (35b) -ru 'street', and in (35c) -k'ara 'inside the house'.

(35)

The elements of this first subclass are not numerous; the majority of the locative suffixes belong to a second subclass that refers to a part of a larger entity. Example (36) illustrates a suffix of this subclass: the suffix -narhi refers to the principal part of a larger area. In the situation in (36), the part is obligatorily interpreted as a body part and the possessor of the face is the referent of the entity that functions as subject. There is no ambiguity; no independent locative noun is required to specify the body part. When -narhi refers to a subpart of the face of the referent of the subject, the eye for example, an independent spatial noun is obligatory. This noun may be marked by the objective case or by the locative case, as illustrated in (37). When -narhi refers to the face or a subpart of These suffixes are considered abstract because they may be used for areas outside the body. The suffix -narhi may refer to the sun, as in (39), to an emotion of fright, as in ( 40), to the center of a dish, as in ( 41), or to a wall, as in (42) (for more details, see Chamoreau 2009: 224-6, Friedrich 1971: 43-7, Monzón 2004: 128-33). In examples ( 40) and ( 41), a non-coreferential subject suffix is used:-ku, as in ( 41), and -ta, as in ( 42). The distribution of these suffixes depends on dialectal variation and on the conception of the referent as animate or inanimate (for more details, see Friedrich 1971: 55-67, Monzón 2004: 252-79). The meanings of these suffixes are abstract and refer to geometrical features, even though the most frequent use is for a body part (Friedrich 1971, Monzón 2004). Their meanings are wider or more general than the noun that might seem to have a similar meaning: for example, the suffix -narhi refers to a principal flat area and may be used for face, hair, eye, sun, light, wall, texture, and leaf, but also for emotional states such as fear and dream. A single noun cannot subsume all these contexts of use. Relations between suffixes and nouns are not straightforward even if the body part meaning seems to be the reference from which metaphoric and abstract extensions are made (Mithun 1997: 359). Moreover, there are no formal similarities between the suffixes and the noun that has related meaning. For example, the suffix that refers to the hair is -tsï, whereas the noun for the hair is jawiri. This is the reason why they do not correspond to a path of development from noun incorporation. In Purepecha the majority of the nouns are built from verbal stems with the addition of a nominalizer suffix. As a result, the lexical suffixes may also appear in deverbal nouns (Friedrich 1971(Friedrich , 1984;;Monzón 2004). For example, the verb era-ti-kuri 'look at superior area oneself', as illustrated in (44) forms the noun eratikurita 'mirror' with the nominalizer -ta. These suffixes also serve as devices for creating neologisms, for example era-nari-'look at principal area' forms a noun with the nominalizer -kwa. This noun eranarikwa was created for 'photography'. The suffixes make the meaning of the verb to which they bind more specific by indicating the participation of certain locative parts in the event.

PRINTED The coexistence of two applicative suffixes is also possible, but this is restricted to constructions in which the second argument corresponds to the possessor of the first, both arguments introduced by the applicative voice. This construction constitutes an external possession strategy. In it, each argument introduced by the applicative voice has its own function. It is common as a way of introducing the possessor of a body part, as illustrated in (65). In this example, the first -ku codifies the fact that the body part does not belong to the subject (Section 32.4.1); the second -ku codifies the patient and corresponds to the possessed entity (the nose of the girl); and the third -ku corresponds to the possessor, Ismaeli. In these constructions the possessor is affected by the action.

(65)

In example (66), the co-occurrence of the causative -ra and the two applicative morphemes results in a verb with three objects. The first applicative marker -ku codifies the possessed entity, k'urhunta-ni, whereas the second applicative marker -che codifies the possessor entity, the first person object enclitic =rini. This external possession construction applies to a verb that is marked by the causative marker -ra. The causer is the subject of the clause and the causee is encoded as a syntactic object in the clause, Celia-ni.

Non-Finite Clauses

For Baker (1996), non-finite clauses should not be possible in polysynthetic languages, as the expression of the arguments must be on the verb, and agreement morphology is only possible in finite tensed verbal forms. Nevertheless, Nordlinger and Saulwick (2002) show that a canonical polysynthetic language, Rembarrnga, has two types of non-finite clauses, with and without pronominal affixes on the verb. They claim that non-finite verbs inflected by person are not uncommon: for example, they are attested in some Romance languages, such as Portuguese. Purepecha constitutes another challenge for Baker's restrictions. This language has three different types of non-finite clause: two subordinate clauses (non-finite complement clauses and purpose clauses), and a syntactic independent clause (the chain-medial clause). In these three types of clause, the verb may be marked by the third person plural object suffix. Chain-medial clauses may also include a subject enclitic attached to the verb. In Purepecha, finiteness is a clear multilayered feature including the characterization of various properties, in particular combinations of aspect, tense, irrealis, mood (ATIM), and referential continuities, and intonation contour (Chamoreau 2016). In this language, non-finite chain-medial clauses occupy an intermediate position in the finiteness continuum between two extreme positions: independent finite clauses (ATIM markers, possibility of a different referent, separate intonation contours) and non-finite complement and purpose clauses (no ATIM markers, same reference, one intonation contour).

Subordinate clauses: non-finite complement and purpose clauses

Purepecha has two types of complement clauses: a finite complement clause with the complementizer exka (see Chamoreau 2016) and a non-finite complement clause.

In finite complement clauses, the complementizer is placed at the beginning of the complement clause, and the predicate is always modified by the mood -ka called "subjunctive" (a type of marker of dependence). Tenses and aspects are present, but they have a distinctive form. In particular, aspects have a reduced form: for example, the aorist is encoded -x-(or -s-) in an independent or main clause, as in (67), and unmarked in a dependent clause. Co-reference is possible, but generally there is no co-reference between main and dependent clauses.

Notes:

(2) The first person object enclitic =ts'ïni, and the second person object =kxïni are always used when the subject is plural.

(1) For the first person plural, the difference between =ch'e and =kxï (or =ksï) today exhibits a dialect variation (Chamoreau 2009: 64) that reveals a diachronic change: in the sixteenth century only =kuch'e (the marker that has been grammaticalized in ch'e) was used.

(3) In the singular, subject pronouns are simple forms, and in the plural, the plural marker -cha is suffixed to the singular form. Object pronouns are complex entities constituted by three elements now considered to be lexicalized, that is, subject pronoun plus objective case marker and objective pronominal enclitic (see Table 32.2), for example, in the case of the second person, t'u-ni=kini.

Claudine Chamoreau

Claudine Chamoreau is a researcher in linguistics at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS, SEDYL-CELIA, Paris and CEMCA, Mexico). Her interest in linguistics is the description of the syntax of Amerindian languages. She has a particular interest in the complexities of Purepecha (isolate language, Mexico) and (p. 695)

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  in Purepecha is mixed or hybrid in type (Chamoreau 2008). According to criteria proposed in Malchukov et al. (

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  Pronominal agreement: independent pronoun and enclitic after predicate: Pronominal agreement: independent pronoun, second-position enclitic, and enclitic after predicate: After an element that occurs before the predicate:(34)Quantitative data are highly relevant to proving that the predicate enclitic ought to be viewed as a new strategy that is marked and infrequent. I have gathered a corpus of 123 texts (narrative and conversation) in which I count 4,182 pronominal enclitics: 3,710 (p. 680)

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  To sum-up: Purepecha has a productive verbal morphology and a large number of slots in the verb, though the development of the different types of suffixes show an unbalanced treatment between locative suffixes and the other suffixes.

Table 32 .

 32 1 Three main sections of the verbal template

	Slots	Types	Categories	Morphemes
	Root	Stem	root
	+1		root + formative suffix
			bipartite stem
	+2	Derivational suffixes	locative	30/50 suffixes (table 2)
	+3		directional	CENTRIF -pa
				CENTRIP -pu
	+4		causative	-ra / -ta / -tara
	+5		voice	REFL -kuri
				REC -p'era
				PASS -na

ANTIP -pe

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3 Predominance of Dependent-Marking, Head-Marking and the Possibility of Head Attraction (p. 673)

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Table 32 .

 32 2 Pronominal enclitics in Purepecha

	(p. 674)
		Subject		Object
	1	ø / =ni		=reni (=rini) / =ts'ïni 2
	2	=re (=ri)		=kini / =kxïni
	3	ø		ø
	1PL	=ch'e (=ch'i) / =kxï	1	=ts'ïni
	2PL	=ts'ï		=kxïni
	3PL	=kxï		=kxïni

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Table 32

 32

		.3 Independent pronouns
		Subject	Object
	1	ji	jintini

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Table 32

 32

	.4 Frequency of the constituents in first position to which pronominal enclitics
	are attached
	+ frequent	%
	Adverb	19.8
	Subordinator	17.6
	Verb	17.5
	Deictic marker	10.8
	Demonstrative pronoun	9.8
	Independent pronoun	8.1

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Table 32 .

 32 5 Frequency of ways to codify grammatical participants

	+ frequent

  ).

	cha parha	large and narrow area long exterior area	neck, throat, larynx, penis, grain, oral function back, shoulder, outer part of the wall, load, cost,
			(criticize) dress
	ch'u p'i	lower and bottom body	buttocks, bottom, background
		area
	ru	road, street
	kurhi	crossing area	waist, crossing area, malformation
	rhi	external body area	body, trunk
	k'arha	interior of a house
	rhu	area projection of	nose, forehead, tip, hanging fruit, olfactory
		something longish	function
	k'u	extremity and upper	arm, hand, leaf, tissue
	ta /	area around the side of
	nta	something
	ma /	open area with liquid	mouth, lips, teeth, shin, liquid, oral function
	mi ti	top, upper area	(miaow) top of the face, eyes, intellectual activity
			(knowing)
	marhi	orifice-edge area	out of the mouth, out of place, oral function
	t'a	flat and vertical area	(yawn) leg, side
	marhu tsi	crotch lower area	lower surface, lower ground, states perceived as
			negative (thin, shame) or carried out in secret
	mu	orifice and orifice-	mouth, chin, lips, open area, oral function (order,
	tsï	edge area top area	blow) hair, skull, head, hat, top surface, spiritual
			activity
	na / ni	interior area	chest, breast, interior, shirt
	xa	flat area	knee, braid
	narhi	principal and flattish	face, hair, eye, sun, light, wall, food, leaf, be
	xu	area arm	afraid, dream
	nti xurhi	external and knee articulation	ear, branch soil, auditory function, atmospheric
		peripheral area	phenomena, quiet
	ntira	external area of an	mouth, cheek, chin, teeth, feminine sex, oral
		edge	function (lie)
	ntu	lower outer area	foot, base of a tree or plant, field
	nu	basic and central area	patio
	p'a /	front area	fire, front
	p'i
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(p. 675)

(p. 691)

Acknowledgements

This research was made possible through financial support from the French Center for American Indigenous Language Studies, CELIA (CNRS-INALCO-IRD), the French Center for the Structure and Dynamics of Languages, SEDYL (CNRS-INALCO-IRD), and the French Center for Mexican and Central American Studies, CEMCA (CNRS-MAEE). It would not have been possible without the support of Teresa Ascencio Domínguez, Puki Lucas Hernández, Celia Tapia, and all our Purepecha hosts. I wish to thank Marianne Mithun and Roberto Zavala Maldonado for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

A relevant syntactic feature of this type of suffix is a co-referential relation with an argument of the verb. These suffixes generally refer to a part belonging to the referent of the entity that functions as the subject, as illustrated in ( 36), (37), and (38). But a small number of morphemes are directly co-referential with a part that belongs to the participant codified as the object, as illustrated in (43), and the reflexive morpheme -kuri is required when this body part belongs to the participant codified as the subject, as in (44) (Monzón 2004: 221-4, 235-42).

(43) (44)

They may co-occur with an independent noun phrase that has the same meaning as the suffix or that specifies a subpart included in a larger part denoted by the suffix. This phrase may function as subject, as in (39), object or locative noun phrase as in (37). They may be co-referential with an argument or a noun that functions as subject, object, or locative noun phrase.

Other derivational suffixes

Other types of derivational suffixes are less developed in Purepecha: there are two directional suffixes, two desiderative suffixes, and five adverbial suffixes. Purepecha has three causatives (with three allomorphic suffixes) and five suffixes for voice change.

There are two directional suffixes, one for centrifugal direction, as illustrated in (45), and one for centripetal direction, as illustrated in ( 46). The directional suffixes encode the information in a more synthetic way and avoid the use of the two verbs that mean 'go' and 'come'. As in the case of locative suffixes, there are no formal similarities between the suffixes and the verb which has the same meaning: the suffix that refers to centrifugal direction is -pa, and the verb 'go' is ni; the suffix -pu means 'come' and the verb 'come' is ju. There is no evidence of a nominal or verbal source for the affixes.

(

Desiderative and adverbial suffixes appear in the last slots of the derivational suffix complex. The use of desiderative suffixes is common, whereas the use of adverbial suffixes is unusual. The two desiderative suffixes are -keka 'desire' and -ncha 'have a fancy for, want' as in (47). The verbs that mean 'desire, have a fancy for, want' are tsitsi and wé. As seen with locative and directional suffixes, there is no similarity between the form of the suffixes and the verbs that have a similar meaning.

(47)

Five adverbial suffixes have been found: -cha 'early', -ma 'quickly', -ntu 'violently', -nt'a 'iterative ', and -k'ama 'suddenly' (Monzón 2004: 65-7). The suffixes -k'ama, as in (48a), and -nt'a, as in (48b) are the most frequent. Purepecha has three suffixes for the causative: -ra, -ta, and the combination of both, -tara. These three morphemes have a distribution depending on the type of stem (Capistrán 2010;Maldonado and Nava 2002). The causative -ra appears after simple stems, that is, roots that directly accept the inflected suffixes of third person plural object, tense, aspect, irrealis, and mood (see Section 32.2), as illustrated in ( 49), and verbs that denote properties, as illustrated in ( 50).

(49) (50)

The suffix -ta generally occurs after a locative suffix, as in ( 51):

The suffix -tara is attached to bipartite stems that have another suffix after the root (except locative suffixes), for example formative suffixes, as illustrated in ( 52):

(52)

These suffixes generally indicate direct causation. In Purepecha, double causation is possible. In this context, the causative morpheme slot is filled by two morphemes. In (53a), the verb te-is intransitive. In (53b), with one causative morpheme -ra, the verb teis transitive and takes two arguments; by contrast, in (53c) we can recognize a Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2017

(67)

By contrast, in non-finite complement clauses the verb is marked by the overt non-finite marker -ni, with no ATIM, no complementizer, no pronominal enclitic, generally samesubject as in (68a), and the same intonation contour. In the non-finite complement clause, there is co-reference between the agent of the main and complement clauses, as in (68a) (92.5% of the occurrences); in the case of manipulative verbs, as in (68b), the manipulee of the main clause (syntactic object) is co-referential with the agent of the complement clause (7.5% of the occurrences). This construction is used in order to indicate successful manipulation.

(

The non-finite purpose clause is introduced by para, with co-reference and TAM continuity, as in (69). This construction is not attested in the sixteenth century and seems to be a grammatical replication of the Spanish construction: para + non-finite V:

(69)

In non-finite complement and purpose clauses, the verb can have its own object codified by a third person object suffix, as in ( 69) and ( 70), a pronominal enclitic, as in (71), or a noun phrase, as in (68b).

Non-finite chain-medial clauses

Within work on discourse coherence, a clause-chain is characterized as the "smallest unit of coherent multi-propositional discourse", one that has "the tightest, most continuous cross-clausal coherence links" (Givón 2001: 355). Chain-medial clauses "carry the bulk of sequential new information in the chain, and display the highest degree of cross-clausal coherence. Their grammatical marking is the most minimal, since most threads of thematic coherence (topical referents, temporality, aspectuality, modality, perspective) remain the same" (Givón 2001: 356). Chain-initial and chain-final clauses are generally the most finite type, while chain-medial clauses are the least finite (the degree of finiteness of chain-grounding clauses is often unpredictable, although generally they are nominalized phrases). The correlation between degree of finiteness and clause-types within the chain in discourse shows that the more referential ones and those with thematic predictability-corresponding to the highest degree of cross-clausal coherence and continuity-display less finiteness.

Non-finite chain-medial clauses in Purepecha are constructions employed to facilitate thematic, referential, and aspectual continuities in discourse (Chamoreau 2016). Such strategies thus correlate with reduced finiteness. When the subject is the same in the discourse, reference tracking is always possible and easy; in a chain-medial clause the referent generally has the function of the subject. In the chain-initial clause, as in (72a), the referent is introduced by the definite noun phrase acheti-echa 'the men', and the verb is marked by aspect. In chain-medial clauses, as in ( 72b) and (72c), the pronominal enclitic =ksï is attested and attached to the verb (see also example ( 27)). The evidential non-pronominal enclitic =na follows the pronominal enclitic (see Section 32.3.1.). Referential and tense-aspect-mood continuities are crucial to understanding the use of these constructions. In non-finite chain-medial clauses in Purepecha, ATIM are not expressed but are easily recoverable. The aspect of the narratives is generally the aorist, as in (72a).

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In short, Purepecha may be viewed as a polysynthetic language that has non-finite clauses. In the three types of non-finite clause, the suffix of the third person plural object may be suffixed and in chain-medial clauses the pronominal enclitic may be attached to the verb, as in Portuguese and as Nordlinger and Saulwick (2002) show for Rembarrnga.

To what Extent is Purepecha Polysynthetic?

Purepecha exhibits properties that lead us to identify it as a polysynthetic language. Even if some of the properties are generally not identified as prototypical for that type of language, the cluster constitutes an interesting correlation for a polysynthetic language:

-Morphology plays a prominent role due to the existence of a number of bound morphemes.

-Complex verb forms feature a large number of morphemes or potential slots per word.

-It allows for "word sentences', i.e. complex word forms that correspond to whole sentences in other languages.

-It accepts arguments attached to the verb, showing, in some contexts, head-marking features: when first and third persons are unmarked for subject, when the third person plural object suffix is attached to the verb, and when applicative suffixes introduce recipient, beneficiary or external possessor.

-Purepecha recently displays head attraction and pronominal enclitics may be attached to the verb, making this language more polysynthetic.

-Non-finite clauses accept arguments attached to the verb, like finite clauses. Purepecha is thus a predominantly dependent-marking language (head-marking features are restricted to some contexts) in which verb forms feature a large number of morphemes per word (having developed widely locative suffixes but less other types) and that displays various types of non-finite clauses. But even with these features, Purepecha can be polysynthetic, even though it is not a prototypical polysynthetic language, unlike the Mixezoquean languages, for example.

The question to be addressed, then, is the position of Purepecha relative to other polysynthetic languages. In other words, the question is: To what extent is Purepecha polysynthetic? Drossard (1997) proposes an interesting typology that distinguishes "sentential" and "non-sentential" polysynthetic languages. In "sentential" polysynthetic languages, one word represents one sentence and the language displays polypersonalism and/or noun incorporation. By contrast, in "non-sentential" polysynthetic languages arguments are not attached to the verb in bound forms, but a whole range of other affixes can be attached to the verb. Purepecha is not clearly "sentential" or "nonsentential", as it shows features of both extreme types, but it is located somewhere in between these two types: a word may constitute a sentence, and one of the arguments (third person plural object) is attached to the verb, while the others may be attached to the verb (see also Mattissen 2002 for Nivkh). However, the new positions for pronominal enclitics that exhibit head attraction may locate Purepecha closer to the "sentential" type. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 November 2017 Pesh (Chibchan family, Honduras). She also explores syntactic changes appearing in settings involving language contact and the relation between contact-induced change and internally motivated change, in particular grammaticalization.

Abbreviations


Corinne Bigot

Patterns of Entrapment and Lines of Flight in Alice Munro's "Thanks for The Ride" and "The Shining Houses"

I propose to read Alice Munro's "Thanks for the Ride" and "The Shining Houses" together, focusing on the fact that each story depicts an encounter that takes place in an (apparently) unfamiliar territory and highlights patterns of entrapment for the protagonists or narrator. I will show that the encounter challenges the protagonists' versions or visions of life and that both stories exude a sense of freedom in spite of the patterns of entrapment they reveal. In Deleuze and Guattari's words, these short stories are defined by an interplay of lines and organized around the question "what happened?". As the stories suggest that the encounter has "left a mark", I will consider how in these early stories Munro is already experimenting with ways to challenge traditional closure and will consider the role played by the embedded story in "The Shining Houses" .

Both "Thanks for the Ride" and "The Shining Houses" by Alice Munro are "early stories: "Thanks for the Ride" was written in the winter of 1953-1954, and then published in 1957 in the Tamarack Review. "The Shining Houses" was written before 1956 and first broadcast on CBC radio in 1962. Munro's daughter, Sheila Munro, calls it the fictional retelling of an incident that happened to a woman they knew and which upset her mother (34). Munro wrote the story not long after the incident.

that a male friend of Munro's husband's told her the story that was to serve as the basis for "Thanks for the Ride", as documented in the interview with McCulloch and Simpson in The Paris Review (235). In her 1989 interview with Catherine Ross, Munro described "Thanks for the Ride" as a breakthrough story, as she explained that "the anecdote broadened out so that [she] could see its social base" (22)-the encounter between the middle class and the girl from the rural smaller town. In "1874: three Novellas or 'What Happened'?" Deleuze and Guattari posit that the short story as a genre is organized around the question "what happened?" (192). "Thanks for the Ride" and "The Shining Houses" seem to illustrate this: in "Thanks for the Ride" two middle-class boys drive into a small town to have sex with girls they pick up at a diner; in "The Shining Houses", a young woman discovers that her forays into her eccentric neighbour's territory will come to an end as her other neighbours are plotting to get rid of her old house. As these short summaries show, both stories evoke another proposal put forward by Deleuze and Guattari, that the short story is defined by lines, flesh lines, living lines (195). Both stories exude a sense of entrapment for the protagonist. Yet, something happens to each of the protagonist, although that "something" is "unknowable" (Deleuze and Guattari 294).

"Thanks for the Ride" starts with a foray into unfamiliar territory, with the two boys, who are "strangers in town" as George puts it (45), sitting in a rather dark diner, in a little town "neither of [them] had seen before" (46). The boys have gone there for two things, "bootleggers and girls" (46) so for what they can provide-alcohol and sex. "The Shining Houses" opens with the main protagonist, Mary, sitting on the back step of her neighbour's house as she listens to the old woman talking. Mary is from the new subdivision, she should be an "outsider" (22) yet she seems to possess the ability to move from her world into Mrs. Fullerton's territory, and back into the world of the modern houses again: "when Mary came out of this place she always felt as if she were passing through barricades" (22). Like the narrator of "Red Dress-1946" who ventures into Mary Fortune's "territory" only to be rescued from it (160), or the narrator of "Day of the Butterfly" who becomes friends with Myra, only to experience relief when the "barriers" of the hospital "close about Myra" and free her of Myra (110), Mary is shown leaving her eccentric neighbour's territory. In other words, the explorer (the verb "explored" appears in the opening paragraph) or adventurer returns home into her own familiar world after an escapade.

As the image of the barricades suggests, the world that is depicted in "The Shining Houses" rests on contrast and divide, including social divide. This also holds true of the first pages of "Thanks for the Ride" although there are no visible boundaries. Instead, the opening pages emphasize watching, looking out through a window pane since the narrator who is sitting in a diner watches the owner watching people outside. Thus the description of the diner in "Thanks for the Ride" evokes and reverses Edward Hopper's famous painting, Nighthawks (1946). 1 In both the painting and the story, the street is empty, and there are very few people inside the diner. However, the diner in Hopper's painting is well-lit and the people inside the diner are the object of the viewers' gaze, while in "Thanks" the people in the diner are watching the people outside. This actually means that Munro's scene exudes an even stronger sense of voyeurism than the painting. The narrator, Dick, is watching the owner watching people in the street, and more specifically, watching people like him, who have a car 2 and go places:

Pop? Chewing on a match, looking out at the street, not watching for anything except for somebody to trip over a crack in the sidewalk or have a blowout or make a fool of himself in some way that Pop, rooted behind the cash register, huge and cynical and incurious, was never likely to do. Maybe not even that; maybe just by walking up and down, the driving up and down, going places, the rest of the world proved its absurdity. You see that judgment on the faces of people looking out of windows, sitting on front steps in some little towns; so deeply, deeply uncaring they are, as if they had sources of disillusionment which they would keep, with some satisfaction, in the dark. As the narrator points out, "you see" these scenes, since his description actually evokes small town scenes that have already been painted, most notably by Hopper. The description evokes Hopper's Sunday (1926), 3 which depicts an empty street, with a solitary man sitting on a curb, with a row of buildings, with dark windows, in the background. The man seems passive and the painting conveys an impression of inertia and desolation. Dick's description conveys a similar sense of inertia, and desolation or "disillusionment", which are even made stronger since the scene takes place on a Saturday night. A few pages later, Dick will mention the shadows of the store buildings (47), which further reinforces the sense that this is a small town scene painted by Hopper. In other words the narrator is not describing the little scene he sees, instead he reproduces something that already exists, which suggests a preconceived vision. The fact that we only see the town and its people through the prism of Dick's limited vision is foregrounded when he describes Lois's face: "her face had no innocence that I could see" (50). In the next pages, the description of Lois's family and house also reveals the narrator's prejudiced eyes, for instance he literally highlights the Niagara Falls and To Mother cushions with the "glossy" chesterfield (50), objects which are epitomes of working class taste-or clichéd representations. It is also quite obvious that Dick's description of the little town relies on and justifies a contrast between the locals, who go nowhere (the man sitting on the steps, Pop "rooted" behind his cash register) and the boys, who "drive up and down" and "go places".

3

The Phillips Collection, Washington.

Secondly, it is also quite clear that Dick's representation conflates moral grounds and social dimensions. Dick describes Pop as "incurious" and "cynical" while the other man is said to be "deeply uncaring", an adjective which suggests that they are unlikely to be touched by the boys' callous behaviour. The close up on Lois's mother's mouth and neck turns her into some kind of monster: "her mouth was full of blue-white china teeth, the long cord trembled in her neck" (50). The grandmother is also dehumanized as she is compared to a "collapsed pudding" (51). The narrator then "describes" a "smell of hidden decay" which he claims comes from the old woman but likens to the smell of a dead animal under the verandah. He then turns decay into evidence of moral decadence when he concludes that his family and George's family are "innocent", but that "these others are born sly, and sad and knowing" (51). Using the word "born", the narrator condemns them to a fate they cannot escape. The description of the house and its inhabitants serves to re-assert social differences, through moral justifications, and to reassert his own identity as different from "these people" (51).

In "The Shining Houses", each kind of house emblematizes its inhabitants, Mrs. Fullerton is repeatedly said to be "old" (21), suggesting she is as old as her house, while the new shining houses have been made "for people like Mary and her husband and their child" (23). One of the oppositions the story rests on is the contrast between disorder and order. The old houses are made synonymous with "disorder", when they are opposed to the new houses and their inhabitants: "here was no open or straightforward plan, no order that an outsider could understand" (22). Furthermore, it is shown that what is now permanent, final, and "impregnable" (22) was first "haphazard" (22). By contrast, order characterizes Garden Place, the new "subdivision" (an interesting word, containing the word "division"): the new houses are "set side by side in large rows" (23), and the narrator uses the word "pattern" to refer to Garden Place. Even natural elements such as the sky and the trees are seen as part of a regulated pattern: the clouds reveal a "long thin triangle of sky", and the word "symmetry" describes the pine trees (24). The emphasis on order, regularity, and the lines and divisions suggest that order and patterns can be seen as patterns of entrapment. Activities are regulated too: every Saturday the men work in their gardens and the wives organize and attend birthday parties. In Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's reading of the short story as a genre, an interplay of flesh lines, Mary's life in the subdivision can be seen as a line of "rigid segmentarity". Furthermore, during the meeting which upstages the birthday party (which evokes a play more than a party), there are indications that the men and women are trapped in their social roles. The men's words do not matter, as what matters is that they express outrage, because this is what is required of them, as husbands and fathers: "it did not matter much what they said as long as they were full of self-assertion and anger. That was their strength, proof of their adulthood, of themselves" ( 27).

The repeated use of modal forms such as "have to" is quite striking in the scene, suggesting inevitability. For instance Carl insists that they "need" the lane ( 27), that the old woman "has to go" (26), and "she has to get out" because the lane "has to go through" Mrs. Fullerton's property (27). 4 The words "go through" and "put a lane through" are also repeated, which underlines the fact that the lane will cut through the house and garden. With the lane, yet another cut, yet another line will be made, reinforcing the pattern of rigid lines and segments.

The difference between what her neighbours see in Mrs. Fullerton's house-an "eyesore"-and what Mary sees is constantly foregrounded. Mary's neighbours only possess, as Lorraine York has it, a "shuttered, partial vision of life" (31), as epitomized by Mary's neighbour's desire to draw the drapes; on the contrary, Mary is able to see more, to see both sides of the barricades, so to speak. Mary gets to see the house, the gardens, the sheds, the discarded objects as signs of human activity and human lifesmoke coming out of their chimneys, patched walls, animal sheds, and so on and so forth. She sees traces of life, as epitomized by the description of the objects on the back porch ( 22): someone has read the magazines, has taken baths in the bathtub, and has sat on the couch which is evoked by the couch springs. In The Practice of Everyday Life (L'Invention du quotidien) Michel de Certeau proposes that ordinary objects have "hollow places in which a past sleeps" (108), which the list of objects in Mrs. Fullerton's back 4 My emphasis. porch illustrates, and that "the places people live in are like the presence of diverse absences" (108), which holds true of the house. Mrs. Fullerton's house has been lived in, it is a living house, since, as de Certeau suggests, "haunted places are the only ones people can live in" (108). The opposition between the new subdivision that requires yet one more cut and the surviving houses is also an opposition between technology and haunted houses. For de Certeau, places that are "full of shadows" (106) are those that are haunted by stories and legends, which he calls "superfluous or additional inhabitants" (106), and can be the object of a "witch-hunt" (106) by "promoters of technical rationalities and financial profitabilities" (106). There could be no better description of what is at stake in "The Shining Houses" where the destruction of the old house is justified by words such as "property value". At the end of the story, Mary understands that her neighbours "have to" behave like this: "it occurred to her that they were right, for themselves, for whatever it was they had to be" (29, my emphasis). Yet, de Certeau argues, the extermination of the hidden places in which the legends live can only entail one thing: "the habitable city is annulled" (106). The story both presents the patterns of entrapment and reveals its dangers.

The pattern of habitus is shown to be very strong in "Thanks for the Ride". The situation (picking up a girl to have sex with her) has been "engineered" by George for a "specific purpose" (50), it may be something new for Dick (it was his first time) but the escapade actually fits into a pattern. The two boys merely repeat what other boys have done before them, as Lois's remark shows: "that's what these guys from up the beach always do. They […] get a girl to go around with. They always do." (54, my emphasis). The girls also fall into a pattern, which the repetitions suggest: "all winter all the girls do is talk about last summer, talk and talk about those guys and I bet you those guys have forgotten even what their names were-" (56) An (earlier) scene in the diner when George introduces Adelaide proves Lois right, reinforcing the inevitability of this pattern. As George introduces Adelaide to Dick, he gradually deprives her of her name: "Adelaide, Adeline-Sweet Adeline. I'm going to call her Sweet A, Sweet A." (47) This is presented as a game, but the cruelty of the game is laid bare by the scene in the car, at the end of the drive back into town, as George asks Dick, "Is yours asleep? Mine is." (57) The boy now dehumanize the girls, using pronouns referring to belongings-the girls' objectification is fully exposed here.

Lois tries to disrupt the pattern of the date that has been "engineered" for one very specific purpose. She does so by the sarcastic tone of her voice but also by introducing formalities that are out of place in the context of the sex date but would be right in the context of a proper date. She puts him in the wrong by putting on the wrong clothes for this date. At first sight, there are several similarities between Lois ("Thanks") and Mrs. Fullerton ("The Shining Houses"), as figures of resistance. Mrs. Fullerton is said to be "unaccommodating" ( 22), an adjective that corresponds to the narrator's depiction of Lois-if we think of the nouns and adjectives he uses to refer to her attitude and tone: "hostility", "contemptuous", "scornful", "abusive". Mrs. Fullerton, it is noted, neither invites nor pays calls (19) and although she needs money, she refuses to baby-sit (21). One neighbour points out that she is no charming old lady, adding, "she practically spit in my face" (29). Mrs. Fullerton's refusal to accommodate her neighbours apparently echoes Lois's reluctance to answer Dick's questions (55). Another striking echo is that the girl and the old woman feel the need to dress up to go out, Lois to go out on the sex date with Dick, Mrs. Fullerton, to go to her neighbours when she delivers the eggs. They do so in order to "show" these people something, to challenge the middle-class boys' /midlle-class neighbours' preconceived visions. Mrs. Fullerton's hair is curled, her blouse held together by a bunch of cotton flowers, her mouth painted because "she would not show herself to her new neighbours in any old woman disarray" (20). Lois has changed out of her slacks and put on a shiny dress, high heels and jewels and answers, "I wanted to show you guys!" (55, my emphasis) when Dick asks her why. The absence of object is striking-as if she could not even name what she is trying to show.

However, the dress encapsulates Lois's double bind, which is revealed when the narrator compares it to Christmas wrappings (51), foreshadowing, as Beverly Rasporich puts is, her undressing: "anticipated in the description of Lois's dress [...] is her undressing, her passive and sorry unwrapping like a Christmas gift" (97). Furthermore while Lois mentions her other "good" clothes, an imitation cashmere sweater, a fur coat she is paying on (55), as symbols of her status, and financial independence, it is difficult not to think of them as symbols of a line of rigid segmentarity-working in the factory to get enough money, to pay for a fur coat (by instalments, which is suggested by the fact that she is paying for it), in order to get a husband, in all likelihood. So at first sight, it seems that Lois herself repeats and finds solace in the pattern of entrapment.

Yet if the echo between the two scenes is striking, so is the difference. Lois wants to show something while verbs in the negative forms are used to refer to Mrs. Fullerton's acts of resistance: she "would not show herself" in disarray (20), she "did not pay calls herself" and "did not invite them" (19), suggesting that Mrs. Fullerton's form of resistance is refusal.

On the contrary, the verb form "I don't have to answer you" (55) frees Lois from obligation. Lois's position and acts of resistance are actually quite complex, and more complex than Mrs. Fullerton's. If we turn to the scene that precedes and the scene that follows the sexual encounter, we can see that her "force" is, paradoxically, her "surrender", and vice versa. After they have kissed, Dick discovers what he describes as "another force in her that lay side by side with her hostility" (56); there is no doubt what that "force" is, but it is the word itself that is striking, as it differs considerably from the description of Adelaide's "aura of sexuality" (47). With the word "force" Dick empowers Lois.

Dick also reckons that there are some people "who can go very far [in the act of love], who can make a greater surrender, like the mystics" (57) and calls Lois a "mystic of love". Lois's surrender plays a great role in the narrator's own feelings about the encounter, which he then describes as "that headlong journey", a phrase which is then repeated in italics, which suggests an echo in his mind (56, 57). Ildikó de Papp Carrington argues that as an adult narrator he "grasps something that the just-initiated adolescent certainly could not have known" (108) when he calls her a mystic of love. With the image of the "headlong" journey, that is a journey at high speed, and a surrender, the sexual encounter becomes an encounter, and absolute deterritorialization, in Deleuze and Guattari's terms, is suggested: "it is because we no longer have anything to hide that we can no longer be apprehended […] To have dismantled one's self in order finally to be alone" (Deleuze and Guattari 197). Lois's gift of herself and her detachment enable her to achieve deterritorialization, as she has nothing to hide or ask for anymore. Paradoxically this is when the encounter happens, as Lois's "surrender" transforms them both.

Deleuze and Guattari's vision of the short story as being defined by lines which constantly interfere and act upon each other, is illustrated in the story, which moves from various lines of rigid segmentarity towards absolute deterritorialization with the encounter. Yet, as is often the case, the line of rigid segmentarity pervades their lives and "always seems to prevail in the end" (Deleuze and Guattari 195): after the encounter, as Dick drives into town (the image of the line is therefore strong) distance is introduced and re-asserted as the narrator mentions "the space that had come between us" (57), which is illustrated by Lois's position in the car, "on the far side of the carriage" (57). Eventually, as Dick drives faster and faster, the journey back into town turns into "a kind of journey in reverse, a film running backwards, erasing intimacy", as Catherine Lanone puts it (Bigot and Lanone 133). Emotional withdrawal is suggested through the various references to the cold as soon as they leave the barn: "Afterwards the lassitude of the body, and the cold; the separation. […] To find our same selves, chilled and shaken" (56). For Catherine Lanone, the adjectives "chilled and shaken" "create a binary rhythm stressing the process of emotional withdrawal, freezing up" so that the Latin phrase becomes an epitaph signing the end of the encounter ( 133).

Yet overall the last lines convey Dick's puzzlement, as he describes her voice as "crude" and "female", which reasserts differences, and "forlorn", henceforth signing off her fate as the one who is left behind, but notes that her voice was calling after them (58), which suggests a haunting cry. As Carrington points out, Dick "narrates Lois's story much more than his own" (108) and Lois's cry, as Catherine Lanone argues, conveys defiance, it is an "expression of resilience" (127), a way of having the last laugh, the last word, by playing on words. More importantly, as narrator, Dick gives Lois the last word since the final word of the story is her name.

It is therefore possible to describe "Thanks for the Ride" as a journey away from preconceived visions towards the perception of greater complexity, at the same time as it describes a movement away from and back into a line of rigid segmentarity: the boys drive away and resume their lives (George has to go back in order to go to church with his mother and resume his life as a parasitic son, begging for money). Yet an earlier scene raises the question whether the encounter might leave a mark after the boys have left (and left the girls behind after using them as other boys have done before them). Lois and Dick are in a field, when Lois notices the burrs on her skirt: "I've got burrs on my skirt," she said. She bent over, pulling them one by one. "I've got burrs on my dress," she said. "It's my good dress. Will they leave a mark? If I pull them all-slowly-I won't pull any threads."

[…] She shook the skirt, tossing a burr loose. (55) Burrs are the heads of the weed, the part that clings to people's clothing, but the word also has a figurative meaning: something that sticks or clings for instance, a burr in the throat (Merriam Webster). Lois's question, "will they leave a mark?" is therefore key to understanding the story. It is temping to read Lois's final gesture, tossing the burrs loose, as foreshadowing the ending, with the boys leaving the girls stranded in the street, not bothering to drive Adelaide home. But the scene also suggests that burrs are resilient and recalcitrant weeds that cling and leave a mark when they are carelessly pried loose and discarded. It is no coincidence that Munro has ended a later story called "Trespasses" with the image of burrs clinging to the pajamas of the main protagonist, a teenager who has just learnt the story of her adopted baby sister who died in a car accident and whose ashes her parents and the baby's birth mother have dropped in a field (Munro 2006, 235). The parents see the ceremony as a final gesture, offering them closure: "tonight [...] we're going to go out and do this. And get rid of all this-misery and blame" (233). The burrs that cling to the girl's pajamas suggest otherwise.

Even more interesting is the fact that the word "burr" also means "the rough ridge left after cutting" (Merriam Webster), suggesting that they can also refer to a roughness or scar. The burrs could then be reinterpreted as traces, scars, intimating that something has happened which has left a mark, as the encounter has, long after the event. In her later fiction, Munro will often choose surprising images such as a footprint ("The Children Stay" from The Love of a Good Woman), marks on a tree ("Vandals" from Open Secrets) or imaginary traces (imaginary welts on the body in "Nettles" from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage) as variants of the scar (the scar features in "Rich as Stink" from The Love of a Good Woman). The burrs in "Thanks for the Ride" may foreshadow Munro's later versions of scars that point to something that happened in the past, but whose traces can be recovered, enabling the character to remember the event.

The burrs as traces and the haunting cry are also a means for Munro to simultaneously suggest a return to patterns and resist closure. The story suggests that the encounter has left a mark.

In "The Shining Houses" Mary's ambivalent position, between the world of the new shining houses and the old houses, is revealed throughout the story, with the opening lines suggesting the possibility of contact and intimacy: And Mary found herself exploring her neighbour's life as she had once explored the lives of grandmothers and aunts [...]. She had almost forgotten that there are people whole lives can be seen like this. She did not talk to many old people any more. Most of the people she knew had lives like her own […]. (19) At first sight the emphasis is on the differences between Mary's present life and her former life, which is relegated to the distant past ("once", "did not anymore"). However, the adverb "almost" changes everything: "she had almost forgotten" shows that although Mary is starting a new life, away from her family, she has not really let go of the past. Mary finds connections with her former life and her own familiar world in her neighbour's house. What she finds is part of herself, and it is tempting to say that she finds herself when she finds herself exploring her neighbour's life. This is the reason why the description of the old houses on the side of the mountain clearly evokes the description of houses in other stories that take place in Southern Ontario. The echoes between the description of the old houses in "The Shining Houses" and the houses in "The Time of Death" are striking:

[…] thick smoke coming out of their chimneys, walls unpainted and patched and showing different degrees of age and darkening ("The Shining Houses" 24)

[…] the other wooden houses that had never been painted, with their steep patched roofs and their narrow, slanting porches, the wood-smoke coming out of their chimneys ("The Time of Death" 99)

The description of the surviving houses on the side of the nameless mountain turns them into houses from the past, and from another region. This also explains why the place matters to Mary, and why she fails to find words and arguments when it comes to defend Mrs. Fullerton: "she had no argument. She could try all night and never find any words to stand up to their words, which came at her now invincibly from all sides: shack, eyesore, filthy, property, value." (27) This is precisely because the value of Mrs. Fullerton's place cannot be measured by the standards of property value-its worth is elsewhere, in its "memorable things" (de Certeau 105), its objects that "have hollow spaces in which a past sleeps" (de Certeau 108), its "dark" spaces and shadows where the stories and legends that haunt it hide. Its worth is immaterial but real to people like Mary who can be tempted to listen to stories and explore ordinary people's lives.

If we think that Mary finds something of herself and finds something of her former life when she goes to Mrs. Fullerton's place, her powerlessness is all the more tragic at the end. She, who used to be able to penetrate into Mrs. Fullerton's territory and go back into her own world, now stands alone, desolate, as if she was cutting herself from both her community and the other world: "there is nothing you can do at present but put your hands in your pockets and keep a disaffected heart"(29). Her disaffected-empty?heart underscores the cost of her silence and powerlessness at the same time as she is aware that she is betraying and losing something that is close to her own past. And as in "Thanks for the Ride" there is the suggestion of an emotional withdrawal: "And Mrs. Fullerton was old, she had dead eyes, nothing could touch her." (29) The verb "touch" clearly evokes the figurative hands in her pockets, which emblematizes Mary's own attempt not to be touched. Mary is justifying her betrayal and emotional withdrawal by deciding that Mrs. Fullerton is the one who cannot be touched by anything.

At the end of "The Shining Houses" a sense of inevitability prevails, or in Deleuze and Guattari's words, the line of rigid segmentarity prevails, as in "Thanks for the Ride". Yet I would argue that "The Shining Houses" resists closure in spite of its ending, thanks to the embedded story which Mary gets to hear. By contrast, in "Thanks for the Ride" Dick does not hear much of the story Lois's mother tells him (51), the truth being that he does not wish to listen to it. The reader does not get to read much about it either, except that the head of Lois's father was cut off and that his coffin was closed. The embedded story also exudes a sense of something final. By contrast, the embedded story of Mr. Fullerton's disappearance introduces a gap in Munro's story, a line of flight, as an event that keeps repeating itself.

The image of the "dead eyes" on the final page echoes the opening scene in the garden, where Mrs. Fullerton's eyes were described as "black as plums, with a soft inanimate sheen" (20), and where attention was drawn to her nose and mouth: "The life in her face was all in the nose and mouth" (20), which serves as a reminder that Mrs. Fullerton is a storyteller. In the opening pages, Mrs. Fullerton comes alive and comes across as a consummate storyteller, punctuating her story with striking sentences such as "He's no more dead than I am" (20). For her part, Mary is shown to be the listener par excellence, as demonstrated by the incipit: "Mary sat on the back steps of Mrs. Fullerton's house, talking-or really listening-to Mrs. Fullerton, who sold eggs." (19) Mary is first described as "talking" and then a dash introduces and sets off three words that apparently qualify "talking", but due to its position, the adverb "really" can also mean very much, showing that Mary was [really listening] to Mrs. Fullerton, and to her story.

The story of Mr. Fullerton's disappearance rests on the contrast between the details that add verisimilitude-the pie to be made, the clothes to be hung, the ripe black cherries, the pail full of cherries, the hat, the brown jacket, and his back-and the mystery surrounding the man. Not only is his fate mysterious (no one knows where he went, why he went, whether he will return) so is his existence as he is made to suddenly "come upon the scene" in the post office scene. This is what the clever position of the phrase "came upon the scene" achieves: "I had this place [...] before ever Mr. Fullerton came upon the scene. Why, one time down at the post office we was standing together by the wicket" (20). The man's existence, from his first appearance to his disappearance, is an enigma that can only prevent closure.

Furthermore, each mention of his story pictures him as going and not only gone: "the broad blithe back of Mr. Fullerton, disappearing down the road on a summer day" (19). The play on sounds, the alliterations, three /b/ sounds one after the other, an explosion of short words, and three /d/ sounds, in the next part of the sentence after the comma, that are far apart, can evoke the sound of the man's retreating footsteps. A few pages later, Mrs. Fullerton describes him as going, using a present tense: "So off he goes down the road, walking down to where the old tram went" (21). The man keeps disappearing, creating the line of flight in the story that prevents closure and counterbalances the sense of an ending that the final lines evince.

The opening pages also suggest that stories need to be repeated in order to stay alive, which is what happens with this story. Mary smiles, asks a question, and encourages Mrs. Fullerton to say more. A dash highlights Mary's strategy:

[…] as she had once explored the lives of grandmothers and aunts-by pretending to know less that she did, asking for some story she had heard before; this way, remembered episodes emerged each time with slight differences of content, meaning, colour, yet with a purer quality that usually attaches itself to things which are at least part legend. (19) The dash draws attention to this key passage that defines stories and storytelling. Stories get richer and truer each time they are told, which underlines how necessary it is to tell these stories, in order for them to become legends. Stories never end, and are never exhausted since they get richer and truer each time they are told and changed. The opening page eerily echoes one of Eudora Welty's stories from The Golden Apples. "A Shower of Gold"5 , opens with the mention of a husband who left his house one day never to return: "Her husband walked out of the house one day and left his hat on the banks of the [...] river" (Welty 9). Welty's King McCain becomes the object of rumours and stories, people claim to have seen his back (15), and through the years people would hear about him "here or there" (17). By incorporating this element from Welty's plotline into her own story, Munro further underscores the role of storytelling as retelling and recycling stories, which further prevents them from stopping to be told.

The endings of both stories apparently suggest that the protagonist's encounter with someone who does not belong to their world is cut short. Yet in "Thanks", Lois's haunting cry turns the story into a haunting story, suggesting reverberations long after the encounter. "The Shining Houses" is more pessimistic in this respect: Mary found echoes of her former life when she ventured into Mrs Fullerton'sterritory, a space where she could escape from the patterns of entrapment, which is going to be denied to her when the house is gone. However, the embedded story of the man who keeps walking down the lane provides an opening, a line of flight that contradicts the sense of closure.

I am grateful to Jean-Marc Victor for having pointed out the echoes.