Adverbs in Lakhota

[ROOD DAVID S]

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

On Thu, 9 Dec 1999, Shannon West wrote:

>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: ROOD DAVID S <rood at spot.Colorado.EDU>
> To: Shannon West <shanwest at uvic.ca>
> Cc: <siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU>
> Sent: December 8, 1999 1:59 PM
> Subject: Re: Adverbs in Lakhota
>
>
> > 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?
> >
>
> Thank you.  Williamson 1984 pg 214
>
	OK.  Please be a little cautious about the data in Williamson.
She is a very good linguist, and well trained, but she worked with
speakers in Los Angeles who were apparently sometimes easy to cajole into
accepting things that aren't generally acceptable to other speakers, and
she sometimes bases rather grand generalizations on marginally acceptable
data.


> > >
> > > 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.
>
> That is what I would have expected in Assiniboine as well.  The word order
> in Assiniboine seems to be more rigidly SOV than Lakhota's.  For example:
>
> s^kos^kobena waNzi hoks^iNna z^e yuta
>
> can only be 'A banana ate the boy', and saying it will get a funny look and
> a laugh from the consultant.
>

	I would be a little surprised if enough context wouldn't make this
version work in Assiniboine, too: topic  position is immediately
pre-verbal, so in a context where the boy is continuing information and
the banana is new (e.g. "it was a banana that the boy ate") this word
order would be predicted to sound ok.  And  I think that's the case with
your bathtub sentence, too -- "John" has to be a continuing topic for that
word order to work.



>
> > 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.
>
> Ahh, so if the NP subject is at the beginning of the sentence it is outside
> of the embedded clause.  I.e. this is not correct:  [John a tub this morning
> he bought] he-told-me.

	Not exactly.  They're both possible. In the sequence NP NP V V,
you can get either [[NP NP V]  V] or [NP [NP V] V], assuming that the
first NP is a possible subject for either verb.

  If I understand you correctly, this would be better
> represented as  John [a tub this morning he bought] he-told-me.  This is why
> I asked about extraction.  If hihaNi and owayuz^az^a were moved to the front
> of this sentence, it would yield the original sentence.  But that would mean
> that the original sentence would have to also have the same reading with
> perhaps a different topic / focus distinction.
>
>
> >   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 trouble with the notion of "extraction" in this kind of
grammatical theory, because as I've been trying to say in my muddled way,
I don't think there's any "movement' involved.  Given NP NP V V, the first
NP can be the subject of either verb.  If it's the subject of the first
verb, then it can be referred back to pronominally by the second, but if
it's the subject of the second verb only, then it's not a constituent of
the embedded sentence.  So we can get the following without movement:
	John [ (he) bathtub bought] said
	[John bathtub bought] (he) said

	But if the "bathtub" clause undergoes inversion, then the
ambiguity disappears and we have only [bathtub John bought] he said, where
"he" is not John. But I am not sure about this, and of course that's the
crucial information you need to answer your original question.  Perhaps
someone out there will provide that data for us both.

	David