Wallace Chafe demonstrates how the study of language and consciousness together can provide an unexpectedly broad understanding of the way the mind works. Relying on close analyses of conversational speech as well as written fiction and nonfiction, he investigates both the flow of ideas through consciousness and the displacement of consciousness by way of memory and imagination.
Chafe draws on several decades of research to demonstrate that understanding the nature of consciousness is essential to understanding many linguistic phenomena, such as pronouns, tense, clause structure, and...

Hernando de Soto encountered the Caddos in the sixteenth century, and survivors of Sieur de La Salle s last voyage in the late seventeenth century gave the first full description of them. By 1903, when George A. Dorsey was investigating their customs and beliefs, the Caddos, numbering 530, were living on a reservation in Oklahoma.The Caddoan tribes, found along the Red River and its tributaries in present-day Louisiana and Arkansas, practiced agriculture long before they hunted buffalo. The tales collected for this book, first published in 1905, reflect the women s horticultural practices...

The Seneca language is a member of the Iroquoian language family. Seneca is a seriously endangered language spoken in upper New York State and Southern Ontario. This book consists of 3 parts. Section I, on orthography, describes a way of writing Seneca words consistently and without omitting features that are significant. Various spelling systems have been used, and are being used, for the writing of Seneca by missionaries, anthropologists, and the speakers of the language themselves. Section II, on grammar, is concerned with the structure of Seneca words. Section III is a brief glossary of...