Ø₁, Ø₂, Ø₃: You’ve got to pick one or the other, although neither of them ought to be what they claim
It is on Housing Project Hill…
Image credit: Brawlify)
Here are the three “nulls” that I often teach about in Chinuk Wawa; fluent speakers are documented as using all of these quite a bit…
- Ø₁ = “silent BE.THERE” (as if you were leaving out the word míɬayt)
- Ø₂ = “silent AT” (as if you were leaving out the word kʰapa)
- Ø₃ = “silent IT” (as if you were leaving out the word úkuk ‘this/that’)
When I teach the Jargon, discussion of these nulls can be a little bit challenging. How do you know when you’re dealing with an instance of Ø₁ versus Ø₂ or Ø₃? They all sound alike!
Of course in reality, each of these nulls has a unique essence. #1 is a verb, #2 is a preposition, and #3 is a pronoun. So they’re going to be detectable by the location of a “gap” in a sentence.
Unless, of course, there’s more than one null in the expression you’re hearing! What if you’ve figured out that someone just used at least one null, but you’re not yet sure which one it is?
Can the nulls occur together in a sentence? Can nulls brawl?
Let’s think this through, with the help of a chart. If we assume (as I did above) that the nulls stand in for the words ukuk, miɬayt, and kʰapa, we can try out variations on a simple sentence, ‘It is located at Grand Ronde’. That’s a main clause, and a declarative, facts that are relevant in what follows.
Here, my linguist-y symbols show my perception of how acceptable each variant is. A “√” shows a perfectly okay sentence, a “*” an unacceptable one, and a “?” one that’s all right only under special limited circumstances.
Remember, to be acceptable, each proposed version has to mean ‘It is at GR.’
- √ ukuk miɬayt kʰapa GR.
(No nulls, totally fine!) - ? Ø₃ miɬayt Ø₂ GR.
(Only OK if answering a ‘where is it?’ question,
or as a relative (i.e. subordinate) clause ‘which is at GR‘ modifying a previous statement.) - ?? Ø₃ Ø₁ kʰapa GR.
(Only OK if answering a ‘where is it?’ question.
Not to be mistaken for a simple prepositional phrase, because it includes the two other nulls.) - * ukuk Ø₁ Ø₂ GR.
(Not OK.
Not to be mistaken for the identical-sounding “equative copular” expression ‘it is Grand Ronde’, which contains no nulls but instead in true Jargon style makes ‘be Grand Ronde’ a verb!) - * Ø₃ Ø₁ Ø₂ GR.
(Not OK.
Not to be mistaken for the identical-sounding simple assertion ‘It’s Grand Ronde’.)
Sizing up the trend of what we find here — three nulls at once is too much, as it provides insufficient information for the hearer to decode the intended meaning. In fact, the Jargon minimizes the number of nulls per clause.
Two nulls are kind of acceptable, but one of them needs to be either the null verb or the null preposition. That is, those two functions are so important, and so hard to puzzle out without help, that you have to say at least one of them out loud (in non-null form). Thus, one of your two nulls in a clause needs to be the pronoun ‘it’.
Even then, the two-nulls sentences are only OK for limited uses. They’re not functionally interchangeable with the fully worded version, ukuk miɬayt kʰapa GR.
What’s the takeaway from all this?
To me, it’s a reassurance that Chinuk Wawa’s nulls aren’t very hard to interpret.
And it’s unlikely you’ll ever find two of them together in one expression. If two of them are together, you’ll understand anyways, because it’ll be in the answer to a question. (The question, you see, will already provide you with the needed background information on what’s going on.)
