obviation in Siouan languages

[Marino]

Well, to put it baldly, obviation is a systematic morphological distinction 
in 3rd-person reference, whereby one referent is focused (proximate) and 
other 3rd-person referents (obviatives) are given *some sort* of background 
status.  In Algonquian, this seems to be always confined to animate 
nominals.  In Plains Cree at least, nominals in the 3rd person can be 
divided into 3 groups:  animates whose internal state the speaker has 
knowledge of, animates whose internal state the speaker does not have 
knowledge of, and inanimates that cannot have an internal state.  There are 
also various morphological correlates to obviation in verbal 
morphology.  One such morpheme is -yi- , which Muehlbauer discusses in his 
CLA paper.  To quote from his abstract:  "Verbal morphemes can be exploited 
to track obviation, but do not inherently encode it."

Mary


At 08:10 AM 5/31/2007, you wrote:

>Mary, would you be willing to offer a brief explanation of what obviation 
>means in Algonquian?  There has certainly been a good deal of discussion 
>about a distinction, or a partially overlapping pair of distinctions, in 
>Omaha-Ponka, for which the categories "proximate" and "obviative" have 
>been proposed, I believe originally by John Koontz.  My understanding is 
>that there is some uncertainty as to whether the distinctions in question 
>are equivalent to the Algonquian distinction or not.
>
>Thanks,
>Rory
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