Postposed referents or just afterthoughts?

[Rankin, Robert L]

I remember that paper, although I can't remember if it was one of the ones that was published.  The Siouan Bibliography or Catherine can tell you.  As I recall, in her elicited data she was getting something like 11% postposed subjects; far too many for afterthought alone.  They also occur in Kaw, etc.
 
Bob

________________________________

From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu on behalf of Bryan Gordon
Sent: Tue 9/25/2007 4:38 PM
To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
Subject: Postposed referents or just afterthoughts?



I'm sure we're all looking forward to MALC. I'm preparing a handout to
my presentation there, which concerns the problem of postposed
referents in Ponca and Omaha. Since the assumed canonical order is
SOV, of course, any postposed referent begs the question: "Is this a
part of the sentence, or an afterthought?" Erkü in her 1983
dissertation on Turkish claimed that given/activated postposed
referents are intrasentential while non-activated referents are
afterthoughts. This can be tested empirically by looking at prosody,
but unfortunately my data has no prosodic information (you can all
hazard a guess why).

I think Erkü's proposal makes sense for OP, and I remember reading
some sort of discussion of OVS and SVO word order in OP before in
which the same question was raised. Can anyone remind me of where I
might have read that? I think it would have been one of Rudin's
papers.

- Bryan James Gordon

PS:
Who all is presenting Siouan stuff at MALC?

PPS:
If anyone will be in Boulder the first weekend of October, feel free
to give me a call: I'm there for CLASP. 612 239 7094