Adverbs in Lakhota

[ROOD DAVID S]

DEar Shannon,
	I am a long way from having native competence about complex
sentences like these, but I'll tell you what I think, and hope that a
speaker or someone with access to a speaker can give you more details or
correct my impressions. I am very interested in what you find out, too.
Where did this sentence come from in the first place?

David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
Campus Box 295
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu

On Tue, 7 Dec 1999, Shannon West wrote:

> Hi,
> I'm a grad student working on Lakhota (and Assiniboine) at the University of
> Victoria in BC (not a lot of speakers of it out here), and I'm curious about
> something.  Maybe someone can help.
>
> owayuz^az^a wan hihani John ophethu ki omakiyake
> tub         a   yesterday John buy   COMP he.told-me
> 'He told me that John bought a tub yesterday'
>
My first translation of this out of context would have been "a tub told me
that John bought it yesterday", but that's semantically odd enough to be
improbable.  For your translation, I would have expected "John owayuz^az^a
waN hihaNni ophethuN ki omakiyake, and that word order is, as far as I
know, indeed ambiguous -- John can be subject of either verb or of both.
But with "John" in the middle of the sentence, I don't think it's
ambiguous -- the unit marked with "ki" is self-contained.  In other words,
the SOV order is rigid and sentence units are self-contained.  The
first NP in a sentence with two verbs (so it's the first NP in both
sentences)can be the subject of either one, but once you're "inside" a
sentence, the NP doesn't construe with a verb outside it except by
anaphora.


> First, could this Lakhota sentence be ambiguous with respect to 'yesterday'?
> Can it also read "he told me yesterday that John bought a tub"?
>
	I don't think so; to modify "tell", the hihaNni would have to come
before that verb, i.e. after the "ki": "tub a John bought ki yesterday
he-told-me.


> In this sentence 'he' and 'John' can refer to the same person, a Binding
> Condition C violation if everything before the final verb is a single
> embedded constituent.
	I think that's exactly right.  I prefer to think in terms of the
word order: if "John" occurs early in the sentence, it can be the
antecedent of a later pronoun, just as it could be if it were in a
separate sentence.  ("John bought a tub yesterday; he told me that")  I
think the problem is with the notion of "embedded constituent".  Linearity
is more important than subordination.



  Is it possible that 'John' is the subject of
> 'omakiyake' that was extracted out of the clause?  i.e.  it would read 'John
> yesterday he told me that he bought a tub'.  And if could be, hihani would
> also have to move.  The question then is _why_ do these elements move?  And
> can 2 elements be extracted out of a complement clause in Lakhota?

	I have composed this answer in a non-linear fashion, so some of
what I say in the next paragraph is redundant, even though it was written
first; please bear with my mental gymnastics.
	At the risk of betraying my ignorance of GB theory, I would
suggest that you're working backwards: verb last languages do have
left-to-right interpretation rules even if they don't fit neatly into the
trees for verb-early languages.  If you start with John at the beginning
of the sentence, it can be the subject of either verb, i.e. the "ki"
clause can be embedded between the subject and "tell me" because the "ki"
clause is the object of "tell".  I don't think it's extracted from the
"tell" sentence; I think it starts out in the embedded sentence and is
represented by a pronoun in subsequent mentions, as I suggested above.


>
> I'm more inclined to believe that Binding Condition C doesn't hold in this
> language, but I have to be able to give some evidence for this.
>
	I'm not sure what this means.


> So, can anyone help?  I know I'm asking at the busiest time of the year for
> some people.  My apologies for that.  Also, if this isn't the appropriate
> forum for this kind of question, please let me know.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Shannon West
>
> Wer fremde Sprachen nicht spricht, kennt seine eigene nicht. (Goethe)
> He who speaks no foreign language does not know his own.
> Kiu ne scipovas fremdan lingvon, tiu ne konas sian propran.
>
> shanwest at uvic.ca
> University of Victoria
> Victoria, BC
>