Biloxi nominal markers

[Koontz John E]

On Fri, 2 Mar 2007, David Kaufman wrote:
> As you can tell, there's still a lot to be done here and I'm in the
> process, slowly as I have time, of trying to sort through the data.
> You're right, -di not only does not always occur with first mention but
> it also sometimes occurs AFTER first mention.  (This may relate to
> Mandan -(r)e, now that I think about it, which also appears to come not
> just in first-mention focus position but also in post-first-mention
> topic position.  Perhaps Sara can help us out here re: Mandan?)  I'm
> aware that -di also occurs on verbs and it may be a type of nominalizer,
> but I really haven't focused on its use yet as a verbal suffix.

I'm not positive the -(d)i on nouns and the -(d)i on verbs is the same
thing.  It might be, or there might be several -(d)i's after verbs, one
nominalizing, and one declarative.

As far as explaining where -(d)i appears and doesn't appear with nouns, it
seems to me that there are several possible ways to look at the problem.
You've looked at discourse conditioning.   You might also look at what
follows, i.e., morphosyntactic conditioning.

In addition, you might take a typological approach.  Look at Uto-Aztecan
and Caddoan, etc., and see what the contexts are there for the absolutive
markers of those language families.   The odds are good that -e will
behave in similar ways.  This is anlogous with looking in the back of the
book for the answer so you can work backward from it to the process.  Of
course, you'd be looking at the answer in a different text book from the
one in which you find the problem, but ...

You might also look at Niger-Congo grammars to see what the contexts are
for inclusion and omission of class prefixes or of partial reduplications
of class prefixes (0 vs. ba- or ba- vs. aba-).  Another somewhat analogous
sitiuation is short forms of adjectives vs. long in Baltic and Slavic.