Dhegiha

[Catherine Rudin]

Dear Siouan listers --
Several of us got together about a week ago for an informal working session on
Dhegiha languages, especially Omaha-Ponca and Osage.  It turned out to be a
wonderfully energizing weekend.  There were a lot more questions than answers,
naturally, but we did at least sketch out some areas we all agree on and some
areas to work on. The following summary of the proceedings is based mostly on my
notes, with some additions and corrections from John Koontz.  We'd welcome
discussion from the rest of you on any of these issues, in Dhegiha or other
languages.    Catherine

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DHEGIHA WORKING GROUP, April 8-9 2000, Lincoln, NE "the Niskidhe Meeting"

participants:  Mark Awakuni-Swetland, Ardis Eschenberg, John Koontz, Carolyn
Quintero, Bob Rankin, Catherine Rudin, Kathy Shea.

I.  We started out by hearing Ardis' paper on the treatment of several morphemes
with multiple functions in Omaha-Ponca (egaN, ama, the) within two different
morphosyntactic theories (Anderson's A-morphous Morphology, Van Valin's Role &
Reference Grammar).  Conclusion:  neither theory is perfect, but both provide
useful insights. A revised version of the paper will be presented at CLS.

II.  The morning of 4/8 was mostly devoted to the definite article system.

What we know about the articles includes:
1.  The same forms are used as auxiliaries (or aux-like elements), at least in
Omaha-Ponca; the two sets of forms differ in Osage.  (Carolyn handed out charts
of the Osage articles and auxiliaries)
2.  The articles code position/shape/posture and other semantic/pragmatic
features, including at least some of the following:  proximate/obviative,
animacy, plurality, motion, possibly agency or subjecthood, dead/alive ('the
former,the late'), actively present/peripherally present/not visible, and/or
transitioning between "onstage" and "offstage".  We had a couple of different
attempts at classification on the board. Although the details of the whole
system need to be looked at further, we basically agreed that some notion of
proximate/obviative plays a central role, as Ardis first suggested at last
year's Siouan & Caddoan conference.
3.  The question arose of how far the system has progressed toward being an
arbitrary noun-classifier system (i.e. does each noun have a "usual"
classifer/article?)  It seems the system is (still) very much semantically/
pragmatically based & article choice depends on the role of the noun in a given
context:  we found animate wes?a 'snake' used with khe (D27.1), dhaNkha
(D169.11), akha (D90.3), and thaN (D190.4), and inanimate, abstract  wadhathe
'food' used with khe, dhaN, the, and ge.   We did also discover a certain degree
of arbitrariness, in that the choice of 'lying' vs. 'sitting' (horizontal vs.
round) seems somewhat arbitrary at times, e.g., dhaN 'round' for individual
items of clothing (hiNbe 'moccasin', uthaN 'leggings', waiN 'blanket/robe', and
the preference for ge 'scattered' in plurals of these.  However, 'clothing' used
the (vertical).
4.  We discussed the neat little quirk of the system that each of
lie-sit-stand-disperse (sometimes?) functions as the plural of the preceding
one, i.e. the article for a collocation of lying objects is the "sit" article.
One example was hiNbe dhaN 'the moccasin'/hiNbe the 'the moccasins'. Kathy
provided an example z^aN khe 'the (stick of) wood'/z^aN the 'the stack of wood'
that may show that this series is at least partly due to tendencies in
patterning of shapes of collections rather than to grammaticalization of genders
in singluar/plural pairs.

Other questions (some unanswered) about articles:

-Are OP akha/ama really animate?  (Carolyn considers the corresponding Osage
akxa/apa not necessarily animate; we didn't answer for OP; Ardis says inanimates
with akha are personified)

-Is akha always singular?  (NO.  We saw numerous examples in a text with akha
referring to two people.  Did we get clear examples without a number?)

Is ama always plural or moving?  (No)

-Is there an animate "lying" form in OP?  (YES; the example with snakes:  wes?a
khe; John thinks corpses can be referred to with khe too.)

-Is the future/modal tta always followed by an article?  (No.  It can be
followed by evidential the in the sense 'shall surely, will certainly'.  It can
be used in 2nd person with no article in the sense 'please'.  There may be other
cases of tta without article as well.)

-Are there inanimate subjects?  We didn't find any clear examples (as indicated
by the article, assuming articles code subjecthood).  What about obviative
subjects?  The role of grammatical relations in the whole system is unclear.

-How can the occurrence of akha and ama with following postpositions be
explained?  (This seems odd since akha and ama are otherwise only used with
proximate subjects; a postposition seems to imply an oblique context...)


III.  In the afternoon we talked mostly about the auxiliary syatem.

One issue was how this ties in with the article system.

Another was meanings of particular auxiliaries.  For instance, we discussed
whether akha/ama are always "continuative".  An issue that needs more work is
how the semantics/pragmatics of the article and aux systems mesh with each
other.  John has determined that all of the inanimate articles occur as both
temporal clause markers and evidentials.  But what determines which one is used
when?  Catherine has an old Siouan conference paper that raises some of these
questions but doesn't answer most of them.

We also discussed the "habitual/usually" aux -naN- which apparently has two
incarnations, a "habitual" historically derived from *shnaN, which is
invariable, and one that I've mysteriously glossed "do be" in my notes,
historically from *naN, which conjugates:  maN/zhaN/naN in Quapaw, maN/zhaN/dhaN
(?)in Omaha-Ponca.  Both forms show up in the 1st person habitual ending
-naN=maN in O-P.  Both the full paradigms and the usage of these forms need
further investigation.

Other auxiliaries inflect too.  A couple of examples are:
    thaN: 1 athaNhe     dhiN:   1   adhiNhe
        2   dhathaNshe          2       dhadhiNshe
        3   thaN                3   dhiN
        4   aNgathaN            4   aNgadhiN

There was also some discussion of causatives, most of which I didn't take notes
on.  One example was uhi=a=dhe 'grow up=1sg=cause' "I raised them"

IV.  On Sunday morning we had a whirlwind tour of several topics:

1.  John gave us a tutorial on verb conjugations in O-P, the first time I've
ever seen all of the conjugation patterns in one place (Very useful!) and the
first time I've understood that, aside from the regular active and stative
patterns, only the "dh-active" conjugation (bdh-/n-/dh-/aNdh-)is used for more
than 2 or 3 verbs.  (Admittedly, there are lots of b-stem verbs, but they're all
formed with ba- or bi- instrumentals.  And of course the irregular conjugations
are very common verbs.)

We had some discussion of the -i (and accompanying ablaut) which John wrote at
the end of 3sg and all plural forms in all conjugations.  This is usually not
pronounced in 3sg in Omaha, unless followed by another suffix or clitic (eg.
the:  dhathe but dhatha=i=the '3sg ate').  However, it apparently is regularly
pronounced in Ponca even with nothing following, and occurs regularly in the
Dorsey texts.

2.  Bob explained all the different "kki" forms -- the suus (reflexive
possessive), dative, ...  I'd like to know more about how these forms are used,
i.e. their morpho/syntacto/pragmatic behavior.

3.  We had a brief session on subordination & clause structure, basically just
raising some questions.  What we actually know about Dhegiha syntax is very
small.  Here's a list of known facts-- ALL of which actually need further
checking out.
    -O-P is strongly right-headed (i.e. left-branching).  At the clause level,
this includes being usually verb-final, with aux's following V and subordinators
following the whole clause.
    -however, there are exceptions:  postverbal constituents are quite common
(about 10% of all sentences in a count Catherine once did) and there may be
other non-head-final constructions too.
    -there are various kinds of subordinators with different properties (e.g.
they differ in what the clause they attach to may contain (modal or aspectual
clitics, etc) and also in what role the clause plays within the higher sentence
(adverbial vs. nominal)
    -O-P is a "null subject" and "null object" language; presumably a pronominal
argument language in Jelinek's sense?

Catherine listed some basic questions that need to be addressed to understand
subordination:
    -What are the subordinators?  (There are several types:  some are (or at
least look like) articles; others are adverbial/postpositional; is there
anything like a neutral complementizer?)
    -What are the clauses themselves?  (Some are arguments (or coreferential to
pronominal arguments); others are adjuncts of various kinds)
    -What is the internal structure of subordinate clauses? (Different from that
of main clauses?  One difference may be that postverbal constituents are not or
less easily possible)

We briefly discussed (so called) internal headed relative clauses, clauses with
ewaN vs. egaN in Kathy's Ponca data, how to tell whether a particle is
clause-final or is initial to the following clause.

=================
An issue which pervaded the weekend in spite of not being an "official" topic
(we'd agreed NOT to get bogged down in it) was orthography.  Kathy distributed
the new Ponca teaching materials (in draft form), written in the newly adopted
Ponca alphabet (Fletcher & LaFlesche with modifications including long vowels &
aspiration).  Ardis has begun using the slightly different F&L-based alphabet
currently in use at UmoNhoN Nation school.  Carolyn's Osage teaching materials
use an alphabet that seems closer to the academic Siouan orthography.  The main
problem we ran into in switching from one system to another was "th" which can
be edh or aspirated t.
    Pedagogical issues got discussed some too; several of us are involved in
teaching and/or developing teaching materials for a Dhegiha language and
thinking about how to teach Dhegiha grammar to children or non-linguist adults.
    Phonetics came up here and there, especially the fact that Omaha and Ponca
seem to have vowel length and contour pitch accent -- Do they always go
together?  Should they be written?

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A fine time was had by all, the accomodations, meeting space, food, etc. were
great (thanks to Mark, our local host), and I think we all learned a lot.

As I said at the beginning of this (long -- sorry!) message, we're now throwing
all of this open for discussion on the Siouan list & await your comments!