Attn: Dhegiholics.

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 14 Jan 2002 rlarson at unlnotes01.unl.edu wrote:
> While we're on the subject, I'm wondering if I could get a little
> discussion of the OP article/positional { the }.  It's been referred
> to repeatedly on the list as an EVIDENTIAL particle.  For { athe' },
> at least, this is clearly the case. But for { the } itself, I'm not
> seeing it.

First of all, I'm responsible for suggesting that the (and analogous uses
of khe, dhaN, and ge, in sharply decreasing order of frequency, could be
regarded as as "evidential" in the literal sense of "evidently" or "it
seems that" ot "must have."  This may be one of those ideas I've had that
turn out not to work in practice, or, at least, as in the case of the
obviative stuff, to have dimensions I never thought of.

I compared this with the similar "evidential" use of the perfect tense in
Turkish (and other Turkic languages), as well as various Caucasian and
Iranian languages.  I think it's something of an areal feature of Central
Asia.  I apologize for using the word "evidential" as that is also used
in a generic sense for all particals expressing some evaluation of the
evidence for a statement.  I'm not sure "evidential" is the term used
for the Turkish, etc., cases, either, as it's been a while since I read
anything on the subject.

As in the case of the obviative, I don't want to claim that this works
exactly like it's namesake, so it's perhaps not too essential to know
exactly how this works in Turkish, but it is interesting that the general
idea is that use of the perfect tense in Turkish means that the speaker
deduces that a given action has occurred or that a given situation has
arisen from some evidence other actually witnessing it.  In other words,
"the trash has been picked up" (or rather, the Turkish perfect tense
equivalent) implies not that I saw it being picked up and not that this
happened immediately before now, but that I have some evidence like seeing
the empty cans or having heard the noises of the truck and crew making the
pickup.

Note that this is obviously not too different in practical terms from
situations like the English perfect indicating that some occurred relevant
to some stated time, e.g., the present for the present perfect.  I think
this would account for the ease with which Rory sees perfect
interpretations.  It might be rather difficult in practice to distinguish
the two senses.  I have argued that the athe 'I must have' examples tend
to show that an evidential sense is paramount, just because of that
"must," but there may be reasons for disregarding this and treating it as
a special case.

In the end, the real argument is that OP has lots of evidential marking
(in the more general sense), and seeing the as a kind of evidential
marking (of the kind indicating "true by deduction") seems more plausible
than treating it as a kind of tense in a language that generally lacks
other tenses per se.  On the other hand, perfect is a very peculiar kind
of tense, by any lights, and the difference between the two concepts seems
to me to be almost a matter of a continuum, in spite of the apparent
difference in descriptions.

> After a noun, { the } means "standing" or "ordered, in a bundle".
> After a verb, it seems to me to make the action perfective.  It
> can wrap up an entire preceding sentence into a nominal package
> that we might translate with a "that"-clause, as in the classic
> greeting:
>
>      Dha-thi' the u'daN.
>      It is good that you have come.

  Or:  It's good that you're here.

This is a syntactical context in which Dorsey often translates the
(sometimes khe and dhaN) as 'when', though one can see why he didn't with
this particular example!  The evidential sense is very bleached here, and
I think this is true generally of motion verb examples, but the idea is
that the presence/arrival of the hearer indicates their coming.

> In all of these cases, { the } seems to signal the prior
> completion or accomplishment of the verb's action.  It is
> as if the implication were: "This action STANDS", which
> would connect the verbal use to the standard nominal use.
> I have seldom, if ever, seen any cases where { the } seems
> to signal EVIDENTLY.

"Evidently" and the other expedients for indicating this sense in English
are all rather marked.  The trouble is that English has no grammaticalized
structure for marking this, so a very marked circumlocution has to be used
to draw attention to it, just as a very marked circumlocition involving
'woman' has to be used to translate precisely the sense of 'she' into
Omaha-Ponca.