Hopi correction, was RE: person indexing (was: Information)

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 19 Dec 2002, Coon, Brad wrote:
> Sorry for delay in answering, its Finals week here and students are
> panicking as usual with papers that were due yesterday problems.

I can appreciate that.

> Hopi has a nominal SOV sentence order but it is possible to leave out
> pronominal subjects and objects if either or both is understood by context
> or previous utterance.  Third person subject omission is most common, but
> the dictionary gives an example of 2s subject, 3s object, and 3s implied
> ind.object pronominals all being omitted. ...

I rather expected that - I'd argue that prevalent third person omission
with independent pronominals here would be analogous to a zero coded third
person in a system with pronominal affixes.  In short, that omission of
explicit marking was the encoding of third person.  And, of course, as has
been pointed out, barring various cases of personification or
objectification, we expect third persons and minimal marking with natural
phenomena.