Strange use of Quapaw article/aux.

[Catherine Rudin]

Fascinating stuff on evidentials, both John's additional examples of ge etc. and
Bob's Quapaw sentence!  I haven't had a chance to think about them much (just
got home yesterday and after 2 weeks of driving around Texas laundry is a higher
priority than grammar) so this is entirely off the top of my head.

John's ideas that the/khe/etc. agree with the "evidence" and/or have some
aspectual function(marking punctual vs nonpunctual?) seem to work nicely for a
lot of the examples.  The existence of person inflection (first person athe)
looks more like grammatical agreement -- and also makes the look more verbal
than I'd have guessed.  Maybe we're actually looking at something approaching
serial verb constructions or even a separate superordinate clause.

Bob's question is important:
    "What I find unclear is still whether or not they are evidentials.  If we
already have an evidential construction with approximately the shape {-abiama},
then what does the addition of the positional {-the, -khe, -dhaN, -ge} in the
middle add to that?  ...  Evidential, incipient tense, classification, what? "

We've been calling (bi)-ama "quotative", but it doesn't always mark an actual
quote.  I've always taken it as more like what Balkanists call the "admirative"
or "renarrated mood" or "non-witnessed" or "hearsay" form; that is, it seems to
mean the speaker isn't personally vouching for the truth of the utterance.  (Is
this right?)  If ama means the speaker is NOT claiming to have specific
evidence, and if the/khe/dhaN/ge indicate (and agree with) the presence of
specific evidence it's downright weird for the two to cooccur, so maybe I'm
completely wrong... in any case, the question of what exactly all these little
bits of stuff at the ends of clauses are  and how they interact needs more work!


I'm still worried about how all this relates to the bits of stuff on Noun
Phrases (aka articles) too...  John's copious examples of all of the positional
articles (the/khe/dhaN/ge) as evidentials and also as "when" are making it look
more and more like the article series and these other things are actually all
identical.  Homophony gets less attractive as an explanation the more the whole
set of forms is seen to fill all three roles.  Maybe we should just chuck the
whole article/evidential/conjunction problem out the window and simply call
these words "positionals" wherever they occur?  (Or for a wordier terminology,
"deictic elements specifying spatial, temporal, and/or discourse position" or
some such??)  But this kind of semantic label leaves totally unsolved the part
of the puzzle I'm most interested in, namely their syntactic status.

I once tried to defend the position that these words are articles, period, and
that clauses they attach to are nominalized.  But maybe they are in fact always
verbal elements of some sort (auxiliaries?) and the nouns they attach to are
clausal?  (Siouan languages have plenty of precedent for treating nouns as
verbs/clauses, eg inflecting them for person...)  Or perhaps they are some kind
of abstract agreement that can show up on either nominal or verbal projections?
Or, as I suggested a paragraph or two back, they could be a separate, higher
predicate which takes various kinds of projections as argument?  I can think of
any number of potentially plausible analyses, but at the moment, no good way of
deciding among them.

Ah, well -- plenty of fun stuff to keep us busy.  And this is without even
bringing up the animate article forms.....

Enough for now,  Catherine