Siouan Conference

[Catherine Rudin]

John Koontz (I think) wrote:
>I wonder if any person or persons who were at the Siouan & Caddoan
>Conference this past weekend (June 2-3) would be willing to post a summary
>or postmortem?

Well... David did ask me (Catherine) if I would summarize the Friday afternoon
discussion and I did take a few notes... So I guess I'll volunteer.  I'll
attempt a short summary of the Dhegiha parasession and the business meeting too,
but none of these should be considered the definitive record -- I'm sure other
people will have corrections or additions.

For the main body of the conference, the agenda that was circulated beforehand
is an excellent summary.  The only change was that Ardis Eschenberg was unable
to attend so her paper was not presented.

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1.  OPEN DISCUSSION WITH ANADARKO AREA TRIBES ON LANGUAGE ISSUES (6/2/00)
This discussion was attended by nearly all the conference participants, as well
as some members of the Caddo and Wichita tribes.

Two types of issues were discussed:  Language learning/preservation and grouping
of languages into families.

A.  Language learning/preservation
Alice Anderton spoke about the Wordpath Society, which encourages preservation
of Oklahoma languages through its tv show and other means.  A Caddo elder
described that tribe's language preservation efforts:  they have a weekly
language class and are working on a dictionary.  (Wichita and Ponca elders
described their own language teaching programs at other points in the
conference.)  General discussion of effective language teaching and learning
centered around the importance of using the language outside of class settings:
parents learning the language and using it in the family, a critical mass of
speakers actually using the language in the community, the success of the
Hawaiian Punana Leo schools which require family participation, etc.

B.  Language families
A Wichita tribe member raised the question of why Wichita is grouped with Caddo
and called Caddoan.  David Rood gave a useful introduction to
historical/comparative linguistics:  how linguists decide languages are related,
how one language could evolve into a group of related languages,  some other
groupings (Germanic includes English) etc.  A couple of linguists pointed out
Wichita/Caddo/Pawnee cognates.  Extensive discussion followed.  Some points
raised included the psychological and possibly practical/political effects of
group names, the (non)correlation between linguistic and cultural groups,
differences in usage of terms like "Caddoan" by archeologists and linguists, how
language-family names are chosen (based on name of one language within the
group, two or more languages at geographical extremes of the group's territory,
a common root word, etc.), and possibilities for changing the names of families
like Caddoan and Siouan.  If all the tribes within either of these groupings
would agree on a term they prefer, linguists would willingly adopt that term.
Questions were also raised about the relation of South American to North
American languages and classification within S. America.

2.  DHEGIHA "PARASESSION"
    A small group of Dhegihanists and interested others got together in the
motel restaurant on Thursday afternoon before the conference.  Participants were
Mark Awakuni-Swetland, John Koontz, Carolyn Quintero, Catherine Rudin, Kathy
Shea, Bruce Ingham, and one man whose name I've forgotten (sorry!) There was no
set agenda and no formal papers.  We discussed several vaguely related things:

a. Catherine gave a (hopefully not too garbled) summary of the facts Ardis
Eschenberg had planned to present at the conference.  Briefly, article choice in
Omaha-Ponca does not depend on referential distance (clauses since last
mention).  We agreed this isn't a surprising result, but it's nice to have it
confirmed, given that O-P articles mark (among other things) obviation, and that
in some languages obviation markers correlate with ref. distance.  It would be a
good idea to check for referential distance effects with demonstratives (e, ga,
du, dhe, dhu, she, shu, gu, a 'indef', awa 'which of two', etc.)

b.  This led into a discussion of the status of the various demonstratives,
which do not all have the same syntactic properties.  For instance, e appears to
be a real pronoun; eg. it does not occus with articles, unlike most (all?) of
the others.  Carolyn Q. has a nice chart of cooccurrence possibilities of the
Osage demonstratives in her dissertation.  Both syntax and usage of
demonstratives are something we could look at more in all the Dhegiha languages
...

c.  Naturally we discussed (again) that perennial Dhegiha can of worms, the
article/auxiliary system.  John proposed a classification of aux's and (animate)
articles in terms of aspect and obviation:

            non-progressive     progressive (or imperfective)

proximate       nu'=akha dhata'=i       nu'akha dhate'=akha

obviative       nu'=dhiNkhe dhathe' nu'dhiNkhe dhathe'=dhiNkhe
        or: nu'=thaN dhathe'        nu'=thaN dhathe'dhiNkhe

            (all sentences meaning 'the man ate')

We talked about whether -(b)i is actually an aspect marker, whether akha/ama
occur on verbs in the same way/situation/meaning as on NPs, and the various
other factors that may be relevant to article choice, including
subject/nonsubject, location of the speaker and topic(present/absent/
moving/etc.), plural objects or recurrent events seen as set vs. individuated,
etc.  We looked at a couple of examples of akha/ama with non-subjects:

Egidhe miNkka'=akha=di e'=di ahi'=bi=ama
at last raccoon=the=to there arrive=prox=quote
'At last they (the crayfish) arrived at the raccoons'    (akha on goal)

PpaNkka=ama=di ahi'=bi=ama
Ponca=the=to arrive=prox=quote
'They arrived chez the Poncas.' (ama on goal)

d.  Finally, John gave us a sneak preview of his evidentials paper (presented
later at the conference) and we looked through the copious examples on his
handout of the inanimate articles (the/khe/dhaN/ge) used as evidentials and as
'when', apparently agreeing with the position of the "evidence" and maybe with
some aspectual factors in the 'when' clauses.

Various details of the examples led us into various interesting tangents, which
I didn't write down.

3.  BUSINESS MEETING
The only item of business was how to organize future meetings.  David Rood has
been making sure a meeting got held every year for 20 years or so, and
maintaining a mailing list, and generally doing more than his fair share of the
organizational work; it seems like time to spread the responsibility around a
bit.  The following conclusions emerged from discussion:

a.  We all thank David for his good work over the years!!
b.  From now on, each year's organizer will be responsible for seeing that the
following TWO years' meetings are set.
c.  S&CC 2001 will meet at U. of Chicago, organized by John Boyle. S&CC 2002
will be hosted by Dick Carter in Spearfish.  The place and organizer of S&CC
2003 will be determined at the Chicago meeting.
d.  John Boyle will take charge of the mailing list for now.
e.  David Rood will write up some suggestions or a checklist for future
conference organizers.
f.  There was some discussion of money -- do we need a budget, a treasurer,
funds carried over from one year to the next?  The concensus seemed to be not to
bother.

What have I forgotten?  C.