Nominal Ablaut, Noun Theme Formants, and Demonstratives

[Rankin, Robert L]

>I've neglected the length because it seems to come and go ...

This is because Siouanists apart from Crow and Hidatsa have so desperately
tried to ignore it. In fact, we have no idea what the length alternations
are in any Siouan language outside of those two.

>and the glottalization because I'm mainly aware of it where e(e) follows
another demonstrative and take it for a boundary phenomenon as Bob mentioned
earlier.

Two things: (1) this is a glottal that is retained even word-internally in
Kaw, so I tend to think it is organic, and (2) the one I mentioned earlier
was not the demonstrative but rather *he 'be' (probably locative, certainly
so in Dhegiha) that shows up in Dakotan (if my memory of these discussions
is right) as ?e.

>I would probably resist a derivational morpheme that was both prefixal
and suffixal myself, at least in a general way ,but I don't have any problem
with a prefix and a suffix coming from the same historical source, say a
demonstrtative.

Maybe I haven't understood, but that seems to be assuming what you're trying
to prove. I think, though, that we may have reached our usual impass where I
assume homophony where John assumes polysemy. This has happened many times
over the past 15 years or so.

>...ga=tta 'to(ward) yon' and s^aNge=ga 'yon canine/horse' (emphasizing
enclisis of the demonstrative with intent).

I've never been able to elicit demonstratives optionally following their
head like shonge-ga. Maybe something where both shonge and ga were heads
like shonge=akha ga=akha or the like, not the former. If both ga shonge and
shonge ga occur as constituents below the S level, then I stand corrected.


>And e=tta 'to it' or 'to the aforesaid' is also not a problem.  I think
s^aNge e would be 'it is the horse that', but I'd have to look for examples
to be fully confident of exact parallels in current OP.

To me it might possibly mean 'that one is a horse', but again here, both
would be heads.  E would be a predicate. Intonation and accent in such cases
tends to preclude enclisis.

> However, I'm not at all worried about the potential for something like
*s^unk(...) e 'the aforesaid canine' existing in Proto-Mississippi Valley
Siouan.

That's what I do worry about. I think that any such grammaticalization
clines we assume have to be demonstrated very carefully, and hopefully with
different extant languages showing different stages. It's easy to say "oh,
demonstratives, they can be grammaticalized anywhere...". It might even be
true in some languages, but I'd want to spend a lot of time looking at lots
of data before I'd want to accept it.

>> In addition, here, we are dealing with two particles that share
neither function nor basic meaning; i.e., they are not a "pair" in any
discernable sense.

>They do occur in oppositions like e=na(N) 'that many, so many' and a=na(N)
'some quantity' or 'how many', which willy nilly yokes them into a pair.

It's true they occur consistently in Dhegiha in WH/TH pairs, but not as
members of the same class of objects.  They are all WHich one/THis one, how
many/this many, how long/that long, etc. pairs.

>Of course, it's a pair that's part of a larger set, including also
dhe=na(N), s^e=na(N), and ga=na(N),...

These only occur in a paradigm with the TH pair of the set. None occurs in
the WH set. It is the TH group, namely, ?ee, *ree, *shee, *ga that form a
set. Ha- is not a member of that set.

But we're losing track of what we're being asked to believe. Personally, I
just think it extremely unlikely that the Ha that forms WH questions in
Dhegiha (and sometimes maybe Winn./Chiwere too) and is always a root turns
up as a suffix -a on a few nouns, has nothing to do with Q-formation, is
some sort of demonstrative and explains noun ablaut.