Lakota demonstratives

[ROOD DAVID S]

I think Connie has put his finger on the source of the "problem" here --
there is simply far less reason to use "ka" in narrative than to use the
others.  Although I don't think "yonder" is a part of the demonstrative
system of English, the question he poses is the  right one -- when do you
need that third degree of distance?  I think it's significant that the
instances of "kakhiya" are among the most frequent -- one does talk about
going _to_ far places more often than about things you can't see or know
about _in_ far places.  I am reminded of a paper (unpublished) that
expressed surprise at an absence of second person verb forms in a body of
expository prose, and concluded that the language was losing its second
person pronouns.

	Probably I'm only repeating the obvious here, for which I
apologize, but note that "le" and "ka" are highly marked in the sense that
they carry a lot of information about the locus of their head; "he" is
neutral and the unmarked form in the set.  After you've pointed something
out with either "le" or "ka", you use "he" afterwards, almost like a
definite article.  And the number of times that you need to point out
something close to you and your interlocutor is much greater than the
number of times you point out something that's far from both of you.

	So I would blame the frequency discrepancy on discourse pragmatics
rather than any kind of breakdown in the system.

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

On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Wablenica wrote:

> Talking about "ka-" demonstratives, they are not widely used in Deloria's
> Dakota Texts either.
> Here are the frequencies:
>
> he' - le' - ka' -  712 : 233 : 20
> hena' - lena' - kana' 137 : 30 : 2
> he'l - le'l - ka'l  94 : 45 : 35
> he'tu - le'tu - ka'tu 7 : 4 : 1
> he'cha - le'cha 41 : 0
> he'chel - le'chel - ka'khel 101 : 48 : 39
> he'checa - le'checa - kakheca 10 : 3 : 0
> he'chetu - le'chetu - ka'khetu 39 : 1 : 0
> he'chiya - le'chiya - ka'khiya 28 : 6 : 12
>
> I wonder, is "yonder" a frequent word in present-day American English?
>
> Connie.
>
>
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