Omaha-Ponca "Evidential" *the*

[Koontz John E]

This was originally circulated among a subset of the Siouan List
subscribers interested in Dhegiha.  I thought it might be of wider
interest, and I know that some folks with Dhegiha interests aren't part of
the smaller group, which was just those folks who participated in the
informal Lincoln or Niskidhe meeting.

On Tue, 25 Apr 2000, Robert L. Rankin wrote:
> And re our last meeting, I was looking over my Kaw texts and find that the
> particle /the/ that we labeled 'evidential' is consistently used by Kaws
> in contexts where they did not in any sense witness the event; it is
> merely a traditional narrative situation. Someone else (Boas, Dorsey??)
> labeled it 'narrative' mode.  This would fit the Kaw usage better.  I know
> nothing about Omaha/Ponca usage though.

Dorsey basically claims that *the* marks a past tense.  He may use the
term narrative past tense.  I'm going to have to look that up if I try to
compile anything on the problem.  I think the source is his ms. grammar,
though it may be a footnote in the texts.  Narrative as a gloss doesn't
work in OP, as the sentences occur outside of strictly narrative contexts,
though one can always claim that the occurrence is a narrative sequence of
length 1.  Granted some narratives of personal experience or
non-traditional fiction fairly bristle with *the*.

I think I am wholely responsible for initiating any trend to refer to the
*the* marker as 'evidential'.  Anyway, I'll take the credit/blame insofar
as Dorsey can't.  The sense is somewhat different from the generic meaning
of the term evidential, which should, of course, refer to all kinds of
evidentiary markings and meaning as a class.  I just mean "a marker
meaning something like 'evidently'."  Initially I always glossed it EVID
for 'evidently'.  I'm not clear when I started saying 'evidential', though
I think this was secondary and an accident.

I had also noticed that 'past' didn't seem to apply in any meaningful way.
One day I noticed that 'it seems that' or 'apparently, seeingly,
evidently' pretty much fit wherever *the* occurred and, pursuing the
issue, that *the* occurred in sentences where speakers didn't use the
declarative, where they apparently hadn't witnessed the event, but only
its consequences, or wished you as the hearer to take that point of view,
and that *the* was also largely, though not entirely, in opposition to the
quotative *ama*, too.  It can occur inside it, apparently as a quoted
evidential.

N.B.  Ardis Eschenberg pointed out subsequently that *the* does occur with
the declarative.  JEK

Note that this sort of pattern is very similar (apart from the issue of
the declarative and quotative) to the pattern of the perfect in Turkish
(and generally in Caucasian, Turkic, and Iranian languages of the Mideast
and Central Eurasia).  Actually, it's not too different from the sense of
the perfect in English, though there the emphasis is is less on evidence
and more on states arising from past events.  Still, this seems primarily
a matter of emphasis in description, coupled with the need to distinguish
'must have Xed' from 'has Xed' in English.

Naturally, these observations remain at the hypothetical level.  I haven't
tried (or really had the opportunity) to verify this in elicitation,
though it should be easy enough to verify.  I can't say that the method of
analysis is one that I'd be thrilled to defend against all comers in an
open forum, it being about as mentalistic as they come, but I must say
that it works pretty well and (apart from the absence opportunities for
testing) it's not too different from the way I learned the semantics of
English.  As in the latter case, the faint glimmerings of comprehension
that come to me don't always lead to a lucid explanation.

JEK