Demonstrative /7ee/ again.

[Rankin, Robert L]

As I work my thru my email I see that John and I have substantially the same
answer to Paul's query. I hope that's a good sign; there is much about
Siouan morphological history yet to be worked out.

>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.

The only thing I might add is that we need to be mindful of the problem of
homophony here. There are postverbal particles of the shape /?e/ and /he/ in
different subgroups that seem to be the 'be' of location. (The glottal stop
in the former variant is presumably epenthetic and a 'Grenzsignal' as ?/h is
not an equation within MVS as far as I know.) Demonstrative /?ee/ and
ontological /(h)e/ may both occur after clauses. This could lead to
reinterpretation of syntactic functions by speakers.

Bob