DPs and Demonstratives

[ROOD DAVID S]

I have thought about this a little, but more from the semantic angle than
the syntactic one.  I think that in Lakota the he/le/ka set marks
specificity rather than (or in addition to) deixis, while the "ki/waN'
particles mark definiteness in the sense of old information/uniqueness.
That is why the head of a relative clause is usually marked with both the
INDEFINITE article and a demonstrative.  To say something like "the boy
who saw the horses told us about them" you need the equivalent of 'there
was a certain boy; that boy saw the horses;  he told us about them'.  In
Lak. "[[[[boy a] that] horses saw] the][ he.told.us"].
	To me that implies TWO layers of phrase structure, a DP headed by
he/le/ka, and a specificity phrase headed by ki/waN/cha/eya/etaN etc.
	And that's why the "ki" is always postposed, but the "he" set can
either precede the N or follow N+ki.
	There are also a lot of cases where the sequence N+ki+dem looks as
if the "dem" were really some kind of resumptive pronoun, kind of like
"the boy, he told us about it".  I have no solid evidence for that
intuition, however.
	Best,
	David


David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006, Jan F. Ullrich wrote:

>
>
> > jpboyle at uchicago.edu
> >
> > anyway).  In Missouri Valley the structure is:
> >
> > Demonstrative Noun-Determiner
>
>
> Lakota allows two structures:
>
> 1) Demonstrative Noun Determiner
>
> 2) Noun Demonstrative Determiner
>
>
> Jan
>
>
>
>