Adverbs in Lakhota

[Shannon West]

----- Original Message -----
From: ROOD DAVID S <rood at spot.Colorado.EDU>
To: <siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU>
Sent: December 10, 1999 9:25 AM
Subject: Re: Adverbs in Lakhota


> 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.

Oh dear.  This is not good.  Thanks for the warning.

> > > >
> > > > 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.

Interesting.  Can you point me to some articles on topic/focus in Siouan?
Lakhota, in particular.

> > > 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.

Okay.  So in [John a tub this morning he bought] he-told-me, John and he are
not the same person.  Forgive my dense head on this, pronominal co-reference
is not my cup of tea.

 >   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.

And yes, thanks to Mr. Lundy I have the answer.  Co-reference cannot occur
between 'he' and 'John' in that word order.  I think I may be able to write
that section of the paper now.

Thanks so much for all the help.

Shannon