Strange use of Quapaw article/aux.

[ROOD DAVID S]

Just a tidbit about the Lakhota articles.  Yes, they too can function as
clause-finals, but I've never studied them systematically in that role.
The ordinarly definite article, ki, can be translated 'if' in clause final
position, and generally marks a future or non-real clause.  The other one
which we gloss as 'the aforesaid', k7uN, marks either a
past-before-the-past clause (English aux. "had" + past ppl) or a strong
assertion of truth.  When kids are having the kind of argument that in
English goes "did not."  "did so."  "did not."  "did so." the Lakhota
equivalent is "s^ni."  "k7uN."  "s^ni".  "k7uN."  I know these aren't
quite the same as what we usually refer to as evidentials, but they do
constitute a use of the articles to indicate the degree of confidence the
speaker has in the reality of the clause.  There is little doubt in my
mind that the article and the particle are the same morpheme, but I would
need to muse a long time, I think, before coming up with either a semantic
or a functional description that covers what seems to me as an English
speaker to be "both" of those roles.  I do think it's related to the fact
that the difference between nouns and verbs is very slippery in these
languages, at least in the lexicon.

David

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