Plural Marking (was Re: Ablaut ...)

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 4 Sep 2001 voorhis at westman.wave.ca wrote:
> Winnebago not only uses /nee/ in addition to either first or second
> person affixes to express emphasis or contrast, but with third person
> forms, /ee/ is used for the same purpose.  Historians, is the latter
> another example of the demonstrative *e, implicated in the development
> of Siouan ablaut, and surviving in Winnebago as an independent word
> without affixes?

Lipkind mentions the ee for the third person, too.  I just didn't pass
that along.

In answer to the question, I believe so.  Actually, the demonstrative e(e)
'the aforesaid' is essentially the third person independent pronominal
throughout Mississippi Siouan.  Its involvement in ablaut isn't
universally recognized, but the use of ee as a sort of discourse-based
demonstative, i.e., a third person pronominal, is recognized and generally
reported.  Of course, like other independent pronominals in Siouan it has
an inherently emphatic or contrastive sense, and this affects its behavior
in various ways that may perhaps make it seem less pronominal to English
observers.

Recently I've begun to suspect that use of e after clauses and
demonstratives, etc., in OP might amount to the equivalent of a cleft in
English:  blah-blah e ... = it is blah blah that ...  But this isn't
really anything new, since e is emphatic-contrastive in Siouan, and that's
basically what a cleft does in English.  All I'm really suggesting is that
in various cases e follows some larger entity to lend its contrastive
strength to it.  I suspect others have had the same thought, perhaps for
other languages.