DPs and Demonstratives

[Rankin, Robert L]

> I think that the whole issue of pitch accent at any level above the word
is an unexplored one.  Even within the word I'm not sure it's been well
explored in those languages where it has been adopted as an explanation.
I've never gone beyond a very impressionistic applicaiton in Omaha.

I have a grad student in Linguistics working on this in Kaw as a project for a phonology seminar on tone, accent and syllable structure that Jie Zhang is giving.  Hopefully we'll all learn more from it.


> is natural, at least if the pattern dem N(def)-gen is at least potentially
analyzable as two NPs in a way that N(def) dem-gen is not.  I think this
would be just the sort of concordial marking that Catherine suggests.

Catherine's data was interesting for the sheer amount of replication involved.  It was far more than I ever had in Kaw or Quapaw.  It didn't seem to mirror Dorsey's 1890 materials, but of course Dorsey was using a totally different method of elicitation and had to write everything without benefit of recordings.  And he was working in different genres.  So I wonder if Omaha has changed or whether maybe JOD just missed these particular patterns.  

> I don't know if we'd want to call dem N constructions apposition.  It
seems to me more likely to be a focus construction.

Assuming apposition and focus are really completely different things.  My only point in comparison to the Semitic data we were looking at is that the DEM/DET syntactic structures are contrastive in Dhegiha Siouan, whereas in Semitic I wasn't sure that was the case.  There adjs. (nouns, whatever they be) simply require the article if I understood correctly.

Bob