Switching topics

[Wallace Chafe]

I wasn't going to say anything because I've been away from Siouan 
linguistics for many years, but David's message rings a loud bell for me. I 
remember a Lakota speaker in Oakland telling how she heard a loud noise in 
the night. She looked out the window "and here" (yunkhan) somebody had 
plowed into their car. So two speakers evidently came up independently with 
that translation.

I've long had a suspicion that most (or all?) of what has been called 
switch-reference is just a special case of switch-topic. The 
switch-reference notion arose because people were making up isolated 
sentences.

I hope everybody realizes that "topic" here is what is sometimes called 
"discourse topic", which has little if anything to do with the 
"topic-comment" use of this term.

Wally

> For what it's worth, my purely anecdotal impression is that "chanke"
> marks a more or less expected continuation of a narration (hence
> translations like "and so" or "and then" or "and next", while "yunkhan"
> (or yukhan) means "I bet you weren't expecting this next event".  They
> thus correlate very often with switch reference (or switch-scene, or
> switch-topic) because a new or changed element in the conversation or
> narration is often somewhat unexpected by the hearer.  Eli James used to
> translate "yukhan" as "and here" in useages like (this one is made up):
> "They were walking along and here all the time someone had been following
> them".

(David Rood)