Postposed referents or just afterthoughts?

[rgraczyk at aol.com]

Postposed NPs occurring after the illocutionary force markers are common in Crow.? To my way of thinking the question about whether they are just afterthoughts would be a matter of pragmatics.? I view them as syntactically part of the sentence.


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The topic of my MALC paper is "Word- and Morpheme-Level Code-Switching in Crow."


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Randy










-----Original Message-----

From: Trechter, Sara 

To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu

Sent: Wed, Sep 26 1:23 PM

Subject: RE: Postposed referents or just afterthoughts?







Adding to Bob's "etc."? These afterthought NPs are also common in Mandan, and they occur after the illocutionary force indicators; they specify/emphasize the main referent in the sentence.? Intonation contour makes it appear that they aren't "afterthoughts," but typically specify the exact reference of a subject or object pronoun.? I was surprised by them, but Catherine's paper made them seem less?abnormal :)?


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sara


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From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu [mailto:owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu] On Behalf Of Catherine Rudin

Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 9:55 AM

To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu

Subject: RE: Postposed referents or just afterthoughts?









Yes, "too many for afterthought alone" was my conclusion too.? Beyond that it was pretty much a vague "some kind of topicality" idea.? 


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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.?


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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



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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 fi
 rst weekend of October, feel free to give me a call: I'm there for CLASP. 612 239 7094


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