Syntax of Lakhota Sentence from "Lakota Eyapaha"

[Clive Bloomfield]

Thanks Willem - your namesake of Occam's whisker-trimmer deftly  
applied! And rightly so.

Do you know, I had thought sentence-final "but" only applied nowadays  
in the most Aussie of colloquial Englishes : speakers (d'un certain  
âge) from rural Queensland (some assert)!
I haven't heard it since I was a lad, when it was probably much more  
widespread in working-class Australian English. I remember such  
utterances as :
"We'll be goin' inter town temorrer orright, young feller-me-lad! Not  
takin' you but." ( Unmistakeable air of finality : a pronounced full- 
stop! I had a blighted childhood. ;) )
I was quite startled to hear that it is current in other English  
variants. I live & learn!
Regards,
Clive.

On 15/06/2007, at 1:36 AM, willemdereuse at unt.edu wrote:

> I do not think we need to consistently distinguish sentence final  
> particle from conjunction in the case of an element like eyas^.   
> Lakota conjunctions tend to be phonologically clause-final anyway,  
> rather than elements right in between two clauses. There is only  
> one eyas^; no syntactic change in progress needs to be postulated.   
> If the conjunction is final some degree of ellipsis can be  
> assumed.  You have the same thing in very colloquial English. To  
> retranslate Regina's examples: "I'm walking in a spiritual way; I'm  
> blind in one eye, but..." "Maybe someone has arrived, but..." It is  
> easier, and less colloquial, to do this in Lakota, because there  
> need not be an intonational break or comma between the eyas^ and  
> the preceding clause.
>
> Willem
>
> Quoting Clive Bloomfield <cbloom at ozemail.com.au>:
>
>> Hello Regina, First of all, many thanks for those enlightening &   
>> subtle comments, as well as for the extra data.
>> Your second example is most intriguing! Is "eyas^" there on its  
>> way  to becoming a sentence-final (adverbial?) particle, (in  
>> addition to  the more usual conjunctional use), I wonder?
>> Presumably also some degree of Ellipsis is operative? (e.g. a   
>> suppressed concessive clause, or such.)
>>
>> On 14/06/2007, at 5:46 PM, REGINA PUSTET wrote:
>>
>>> Sentence-final eyas^ occurs in my data also. It imposes a   
>>> concessive meaning that is sometimes hard to capture in   
>>> translations. In
>>>
>>> wakhaN-yaN    ma-wa-ni                  is^ta  ma-  
>>> sanila                   eyas^.
>>> spiritual-ADV  walk-1SG.AG-walk  eye  1SG.PAT-one+sided  EYAS^
>>> 'I'm walking in a spiritual way, although I'm blind on one eye
>>>
>>> 'although' works as a translation. The next example is a tougher  
>>> case:
>>>
>>> tuwa         lel    hi        sece      eyas^.
>>> someone  here  arrive  maybe  EYAS^
>>> 'Maybe someone has arrived'
>>>
>>> Here eyas^ implies that the arrival of 'someone' should have  
>>> been  noticed by the speaker. A more literal translation of your  
>>> example  might be something like 'although I have dealt with this  
>>> in great  detail [continuative -haN intensifies action] (and I  
>>> actually  should have encountered problems), I think it is easy  
>>> to do'.
>>> iNs^e is an attenuating particle that can be translated by  
>>> 'just'  or 'maybe' in many cases.
>>> BTW: is there a typo in kechámiN ? I'm familiar with the form   
>>> kechaNmi for 'I think that' only.
>>>
>>> Regina
>