Strange use of Quapaw article/aux.

[Koontz John E]

On Fri, 16 Jun 2000, Catherine Rudin wrote:

> We've been calling (bi)-ama "quotative", but it doesn't always mark an
> actual quote.  I've always taken it as more like what Balkanists call
> the "admirative"  or "renarrated mood" or "non-witnessed" or "hearsay"
> form; that is, it seems to mean the speaker isn't personally vouching
> for the truth of the utterance.  (Is this right?)  If ama means the
> speaker is NOT claiming to have specific evidence, and if
> the/khe/dhaN/ge indicate (and agree with) the presence of specific
> evidence it's downright weird for the two to cooccur, so maybe I'm
> completely wrong... in any case, the question of what exactly all these
> little bits of stuff at the ends of clauses are and how they interact
> needs more work!

The Balkan sense is the one that Siouanists intend, I think.  Anyway, it's
the one I understand:  information that is supported by general repetition
and acceptance, not by personal experience.  If you think of ama in this
sense as a sort of higher predicate, then it's not too surprising that it
can occur above the other evidential, the one that works somewhat like a
Turkish perfect.  That in itself is a sort of higher predicate, and
they're just nested:  "They say that it seemed that ..."  What's a bit
surprising is that I don't think that the declarative (personal
experience) is nested within the quotative - though now I'll have to check
seriously, i.e., no "They say that he asserted personally that ..."

> I'm still worried about how all this relates to the bits of stuff on
> Noun Phrases (aka articles) too...  John's copious examples of all of
> the positional articles (the/khe/dhaN/ge) as evidentials and also as
> "when" are making it look more and more like the article series and
> these other things are actually all identical.  Homophony gets less
> attractive as an explanation the more the whole set of forms is seen to
> fill all three roles.

I think we have to have both a general name, for which positionals might
do, and a functional name, for uses in particular contexts.  The contexts
for the the/khe/dhaN/ge set that I know of are:

- simple evidential with independent (?) sentence:  [ ... verb-(PLUR)-EVID
...]
- future of surity (shall surely ...):  [... verb tta-(PLUR)-EVID ...]
- when clauses:  [... verb EVID]-(POSTPOSITION)
- articles (NP)-(DEM)-EVID-(POSTPOSITION)
- INDEFINITE/INTERROGATIVE-EVID-POSTPOSITION as 'where?'
- e-the 'may' and e-the-gaN 'maybe' "modals"

Note that last night I also noticed that there are instances of =the=di=hi
'when' combined with kki 'when' with something like future hypothetical
meaning.

> I once tried to defend the position that these words are articles,
> period, and that clauses they attach to are nominalized.  But maybe they
> are in fact always verbal elements of some sort (auxiliaries?) and the
> nouns they attach to are clausal?

I think these are not all that different, for Siouan purposes.

> Or perhaps they are some kind of abstract agreement that can show up on
> either nominal or verbal projections? Or, as I suggested a paragraph or
> two back, they could be a separate, higher predicate which takes various
> kinds of projections as argument?  I can think of any number of
> potentially plausible analyses, but at the moment, no good way of
> deciding among them.

Anyway, they seem to agree with something about the noun or clause.  The
only way I can get at it presently is by looking at examples in Dorsey.
It's usually clear why khe, dhaN or ge might be used, but unless *the*
also has personal agreement, it's hard to know what it might be agreeing
with.

Regina Pustet said at the Caddoan & Siouan Conference (I guess we can call
it that this time), that Dakotan articles are used in similar ways.  They
wouldn't agree in gender, of course, but is there any literature on this?

----

Returning to terminology, we might call akha/ama 'animate [something]
positionals', and dhiNkhe/thaN/dhiN/ma 'animate [un-something]
positionals', and the/khe/gdhaN/ge 'inanimate positionals'.  Of course,
khe tends to show up in at least the 'animate [un-something] positionals'
list, too.  '(Un)something' here would be either proximate/obviative or
marked/unmarked, as possibilities.  There is a fourth set of positionals,
namely the/gdhe/he/khe/dhaN/gdhaN that occur in
'suddenly/inceptive/iterative' auxiliaries and in verbs of placement and a
few other less clear contexts.  Also, the regular verbs of posture
naz^iN/a...gdhiN/z^aN/maN...dhiN have some grammatical uses.

These several classes could be referred to as definite articles,
conjunctions, auxiliaries, etc., of various sorts in context.  I haven't
thought out the details yet.

JEK