obviation in Siouan languages

[Bryan Gordon]

Topics can easily be described in Prague-school terms quite simply as
"old information." The Japanese topic behaviour generally aligns with
contexts where "as for TOPIC" would be possible in English, e.g. "As
for yesterday, I went shopping, while as for today, I sewed a dress"
or "As for Sally, Harry gave her books, while as for Mary, he gave her
plates."

Japanese ga cannot be translated with "as for", on the other hand:
"#!As for Harry, he slept, not Mary." This, from the Prague-school
terminology, is precisely the opposite of a topic: it is a focus, or
"new information." We already know that someone slept, the new
information is the identity of the sleeper. In the other contexts, the
dates and characters are not important, but rather the new information
is what is associated with them.

Of course, to make things even more complicated, both topic and focus
have similar syntactic behaviour in many languages. But it is also
quite common cross-linguistically to see topics fronted and foci
right-edged. Ojibwe is one such language, and so is Finnish. Spanish,
too, to a certain extent, right-displaces new and left-displaces old
information. In fact, that's precisely what English "as for" does, is
moves old information left.

The sort of focus that contrasts with topic in pragmatic terms should
not be confused with the entirely different cognitive/psychological
use of the word focus, which is ironically enough almost never
associated with a pragmatic focus and almost always with a pragmatic
topic.

Ojibwe has particles that seem to behave similarly to the
Lakhota/Dakota particles mentioned earlier. I know this is the Siouan
list, but we've been comparing Algonquian and Siouan during the whole
thread, so why stop now?

One is (i)dash (I believe in Cree this is itahsh), and can be appended
to just about any constituent, as long as that constituent is near the
left edge. It serves to contrast the constituent before it with
something mentioned earlier. Some examples:

Gii-nagamo dash gii-niimi'iwed
PST-sing CTR PST-make.dance
While he had them dance, he sang.

Bezhig onik odanokaazon dewe'iged nagamod. Bezhig idash odanokaazon onik nisaad.
One arm he.worked.with drumming singing. One CTR he.worked.with arm killing.
He used one arm to drum while he sang. One arm he used to kill.

Zhingiben' dash ashkwaandeng gii-niimi. Gomaapii dash gii-dooskaabi
a'aw zhingiben'.
Hell.diver CTR at.the.door PST-dance. A.while CTR PST-peek D hell.diver
Hell-Diver, now, was dancing at the door. After a while he peeked out.

(i)dash is also contracted onto many other function words to create
things like aaniish "well now", awenesh "now, who on earth", miish
"now, that's who/what"...

What these have in common is simply contrast, not topic or focus. In
the first example, in fact, dash is appended to the focus (we already
knew about the dancing before this sentence), while in the second
example there's a topic with idash, and in the third there's a focus
again on Hell-Diver, and then a contrastive topic on the elapsing of
time. Contrast is not necessarily related to topic or focus, as Rory
notes by exploring the two very different contrastive particles in
Japanese.

The other contrastive particle I'm thinking of in Ojibwe is (i)sa,
which is just as common as (i)dash, and is appended to things which
could be said to answer contrastive questions, even if the question is
not overtly stated. For instance:

"Wegonesh iw ziing? 'Akawaabin' sa wii nii gigii-inin."
"What.CTR D sizzle? 'Watch.out' CTR I you I.told.you
"What's that sizzling? I told you 'Watch out'" (not something else)

Babaa-anokiitaage apane. Mii sa iw ezhi-bimaadizid.
Always.going.around-working.for always. FOC CTR D way-she.lives
She's always going around working for people. That's the way she lives
(and not some other way).

Sometimes (i)sa just throws extra intensity on something which may not
be contrastive in any significant way beyond that it is not what was
just being talked about.

Aw isa niningwan gaa-aawid gagwaanisagakamig gaa-gidimaaginaagozid.
D CTR son-in-law PST-was.so awfully PST-looking.wretched
That son-in-law of mine looked awfully wretched.

Although these things can clearly be used for switch-reference-like
effects, much like the proximate -(b)i in Omaha-Ponca, which has
little if anything to do with contrast, topic or focus, I'd hesitate
to call them that. These contrastive particles also have no
distributional restrictions relative to obviation, and can occur on
obviatives and proximates alike. Part of the reason -(b)i is called
proximate in OP is that it does NOT appear on verbs that agree with
obviative subjects. At least, not above margin of error. I wonder what
the distribution of these Lakhota/Dakota particles is relative to
"obviation" or "case marking" or whatever else Lakhota/Dakota has in
its repertoire.