These essays were drawn from the papers presented at the Linguistic Society of America's Summer Institute at the State University of New York at Oswego in 1976. The contents are as follows: Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun, "Introduction: North American Indian Historical Linguistics in Current Perspective" Ives Goddard, "Comparative Algonquian" Marianne Mithun, "Iroquoian" Wallace L. Chafe, "Caddoan" David S. Rood, "Siouan" Mary R. Haas, "Southeastern Languages" James M. Crawford, "Timucua and Yuchi: Two Language Isolates of the Southeast" Ives Goddard, "The Languages of South Texas and the Lower Rio Grande" Irvine Davis, "The Kiowa-Tanoan, Keresan, and Zuni Languages" Susan Steele, "Uto-Aztecan: An Assessment for Historical and Comparative Linguistics" William H. Jacobsen, Jr., "Hokan lnter-Branch Comparisons" Margaret Langdon, "Some Thoughts on Hokan with Particular Reference to Pomoan and Yuman" Michael Silverstein, ''Penutian: An Assessment" Laurence C. Thompson, "Salishan and the Northwest" William H. Jacobsen, Jr., "Wakashan Comparative Studies" William H. Jacobsen, Jr., "Chimakuan Comparative Studies" Michael E. Krauss, "Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut" Lyle CampbelI, "Middle American Languages" Eric S. Hamp, "A Glance from Now On."

Mourning Dove was the pen name of Christine Quintasket, a member of the Colville Federated Tribes of eastern Washington State. She was the author of Cogewea, The Half-Blood (one of the first novels to be published by a Native American woman) and Coyote Stories, both reprinted as Bison Books. Jay Miller, formerly assistant director and editor at the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian, Newberry Library, Chicago, now is an independent scholar and writer in Seattle. He is the compiler of Earthmaker: Tribal Stories from Native North America.

Thirteen of the chapters that comprise the contents of this first volume of Native Languages of the A mericas were originally commissioned by the undersigned in his capacity as Editor of the fourteen volume series (1963-1976), Current Trends in Linguistics. All appeared, in 1973, under Part Three of the quadripartite Vol. 10, subtitled Linguistics in North America. Two additional chaplers are being held over for the volume to follow shortly, devoted to Central and South American lan guages and linguistics, where they more appropriately belong. A fourteenth chapter, on the" Historiography of native North A merican linguistics," was written similarly by invitation, for Vol. 13, subtitled Historiography of Linguistics, published in 1975. Both Volumes 10 and 13 were jointly financed by the United States National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, with an enhancing contribution to the former by the Canada Council. The generosity of these funding agencies was, of course, previously acknowledged in my respective Editor's Introductions to the two books mentioned, but cannot be repeated too often: without their welcome and timely assistance, the global project could scarcely have been realized on so comprehensive a scale. The Current Trends in Linguistics series was a long-term venture of Mouton Publishers, of The Hague, under the imaginative in-house direction of Peter de Rid der. Various spin-offs were foreseen, and some of them happily realized.

This handbook provides broad coverage of the languages indigenous to North America, with special focus on typologically interesting features and areal characteristics, surveys of current work, and topics of particular importance to communities. The volume is divided into two major parts: subfields of linguistics and family sketches. The subfields include those that are customarily addressed in discussions of North American languages (sounds and sound structure, words, sentences), as well as many that have received somewhat less attention until recently (tone, prosody, sociolinguistic variation, directives, information structure, discourse, meaning, language over space and time, conversation structure, evidentiality, pragmatics, verbal art, first and second language acquisition, archives, evolving notions of fieldwork). Family sketches cover major language families and isolates and highlight topics of special value to communities engaged in work on language maintenance, documentation, and revitalization.

The present volume consists of nine articles dealing with the role of the constituent 'phonological word' (or 'prosodic word') in various typologically diverse languages. These languages and their respective families subsume Indo-European (Dutch, German, English, European Portuguese), Bantu (SiSwati, KiNande), Algonquian (Cree), Siouan (Dakota), and Salishan (Lushootseed). One contribution examines the phonological word in a sign language. The theoretical issues dealt with in the book include: evidence for the phonological word (e.g. rules, phonotactics, syllabification, stress patterns), the connection between morphosyntactic and prosodic structure (e.g. alignment phenomena in Optimality Theory), and the relationship between the phonological word and other prosodic constituents (e.g. the prosodic representation of clitics).The volume will be of interest to all linguists and advanced students of linguistics working on Prosodic Phonology, phonology–morphology and phonology–syntax interface and Optimality Theory.