obviation in Siouan languages

[ROOD DAVID S]

For what it's worth, my purely anecdotal impression is that "chanke" marks 
a more or less expected continuation of a narration (hence translations 
like "and so" or "and then" or "and next", while "yunkhan" (or yukhan) 
means "I bet you weren't expecting this next event".  They thus correlate 
very often with switch reference (or switch-scene, or switch-topic) 
because a new or changed element in the conversation or narration is often 
somewhat unexpected by the hearer.  Eli James used to translate "yukhan" 
as "and here" in useages like (this one is made up): "They were walking 
along and here all the time someone had been following them".


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

On Mon, 11 Jun 2007, willemdereuse at unt.edu wrote:

> Quoting REGINA PUSTET <pustetrm at yahoo.com>:
>
>>> 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.
>>
>>  To me, there is no evidence for the existence of obviation in Lakota, if 
>> we define obviation as a system for manipulating pragmatic perspective.
>
> Regina:
>
> I was wondering if you had any thoughts/ideas about the yuNkhaN/chaNke 
> alternation in Lakota.  I agree with Dave Rood's earlier answer to my 
> question about this, i.e. that Lungstrum's dissertation has not elucidated 
> this convincingly.
>
> There is definitely some sort of alternation in Deloria's Dakota Texts, even 
> though texts by (at least some) modern speakers do not seem to have this.
>
> Willem de Reuse
>