Comparative Siouan Grammar project

[Catherine Rudin]

Johannes - Many thanks for the list!!

By "a whole day" I meant "at least a whole day" :-) 

Catherine

>>> "Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht" <johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regensburg.de>
06/18/08 6:24 AM >>>
Dear Siouanists,

taking up Bob's, Mark's and Cathrine's responses to my mail I would like to
propose the following with regard to our Comparative Siouan Grammar
(CSG) project. If this can be agreed upon among the participants of the
conference in Joplin, I would like to volunteer for the organization of the
workshop on CSG in Lincoln,NE next year.

Cathrine suggested to spend a full day on the workshop. I think, this might
be very short. In Billings, we had presentation/ papers filling at least two full
days, although the time slots were quite generous, something like 90
minutes per presentation. We can of course shorten that a bit. I attach the
program of the CSG Workshop in Billings as a pdf to this mail.

In Billings, we had a planning session led by Linda Cumberland and John
Boyle. On the huge blackboard there we outlined and summarized the
topics to be included in the projected three volume opus of a CSG.

According to my notes and recollections, Vol. III contains sketches of the
individual Siouan languages following perhaps a common scheme (which
does not exist yet, of course)

Vol. I contains investigations to the following topics. I will mention also the
names as far as I can remember (I may be wrong, though).

Obliques/ Postpositions (Regina Pustet)
Applicatives (including the benefactive applicative) (Johannes Helmbrecht)
Determiners (?)
Nominal Possession (?)
t-words (Bruce Ingham?)
Prefixes (morphological positions, etc.) (Bob Rankin)
Suffixes/ Enclitics  (Bob Rankin)
Relative Clauses (?)
Switch references and clase chaining (John Boyle)
Pronominals and the stative/active split (Bob Rankin)
Deictic motion verbs (Linda Cumberland)

Vol II contains the following topics:

Plural marking
Compounding
Noun incorporation
Causatives (Helmbrecht)
External Possession
Coordination
Subordination
Instrumentals
Absolutive (wa-)
TAM
Negation
Serial verbs (David Rood ?)

That's what I have in my notes perhaps John or Linda have more in their
files.

The topics of the two volumes as given above are unordered and rather a
list of key words than a systematically developed structure of such a
project. But it was the point where we stopped further planning. It might
serve as the starting point for pushing the whole thing further.

As I indicated in my last mail, it would be of some importance for me if I
knew the precise date of the next conference in Lincoln. So, perhaps, this
could be decided on in Joplin in the coming days.

I wish everyone a wonderful and exciting conference in Joplin,

Best
Johannes