Postposed referents or just afterthoughts?

[Catherine Rudin]

Yes, "too many for afterthought alone" was my conclusion too.  Beyond
that it was pretty much a vague "some kind of topicality" idea.  
 
Incidentally, I just looked back at the paper I sent out earlier to
remind myself what I said (oy - I'm getting feeble minded) and saw that
the examples are practically illegible.  I used fonts back then that my
system no longer supports, and I suspect most of you guys also see an
amusing array of hieroglyphics if you try to read it... Please accept my
apologies.  If anyone would like a corrected version, with examples in
the current orthography, do let me know; I'm planning on fixing it right
away, before I forget, and it won't take long. 
 
Catherine

>>> rankin at ku.edu 9/26/2007 9:30 AM >>>

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?" Erkin 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
Erkproposal 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


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