Dene

Abstract Dene languages, with their small inventory of lexical roots and inflectional and derivational morphology, pose an interesting case for the study of conversion. This chapter looks at three areas of Upper Tanana Dene where one root underlies stems of different lexical categories: postpositions/subordinators, postpositions/nouns, and nouns/verbs. Semantic and morphosyntactic evidence suggests conversion only for postpositions/subordinators; categorial underspecification of the root is a better analysis in the other cases. Nouns/postpositions can be distinguished only distributionally and often either interpretation fits the sentence meaning. Noun and verb stems often share a root, but subsequent derivation using noun formatives or historical aspect suffixes often results in subtle differences between related stems. Historical sound changes further obscure the relationship. Finally, many of the derivational processes go back to Proto-Dene and are not synchronously productive.