Strange use of Quapaw article/aux.

[R. Rankin]

> John's ideas that the/khe/etc. agree with the "evidence" and/or have some
> aspectual function(marking punctual vs nonpunctual?) seem to work nicely for a
> lot of the examples.  The existence of person inflection (first person athe)
> looks more like grammatical agreement -- and also makes the look more verbal
> than I'd have guessed.  Maybe we're actually looking at something approaching
> serial verb constructions or even a separate superordinate clause.

All the animate positionals now have conjugated forms.  a-nihe, a-thaN, m-iNkhe,
and presumably either a-khe or mi-khe (the latter for sure in Quapaw for -khe).  So
they've gone from being Proto-Siouan verb roots 'sit, stand, lie' to classificatory
demonstratives in Mandan, classifiers in Dakotan, classificatory articles in Dhegiha
and then back to being conjugated verbs in Dhegiha.  Full circle.  I haven't seen
the inanimate articles conjugated but of course the inanimate ones shouldn't have
1st and 2nd person forms.

>
>     "What I find unclear is still whether or not they are evidentials."

I'm still asking that question.  This is something that really begs for fresh field
work.  Maybe Kathy can try contrasting the forms with -abiama and
-abi-{positional}-ama (if I got the syntax right there) to see what differences in
meaning there are.  She could start with John's examples from the JOD texts.  It's
clear that the positionals have undergone massive amounts of additional
grammaticalization in Dhegiha and that we're only beginning to understand some of
them.

I agree with Catherine that -abiama, to use the Omaha form, is similar to Balkan
hearsay.  I'm a lot less clear on the function of the positionals in the same
complex.  Turkish -ti/-mi$ is just the Turkish way of rendering the Balkan hearsay
distinction.  And it's probably the origin of it.

Bob