Re: (con)lang names & RE: Pima determiners

On Sat, 25 Nov 2000, SMITH,MARCUS ANTHONY wrote:

> On Sat, 25 Nov 2000, And Rosta wrote:
> >
> > Dirk:
> > > fellow U of A student Colleen Fitzgerald (now at SUNY
> > > Buffalo) wrote a little paper ("Prosody Drives the Syntax") in which
> > > she claimed that the Tohono O'odham determiner _g_ was deleted when
> > > sentence initial for prosodic reasons--something like "can't begin a
> > > sentence with a stressless element." In other words, prosody takes
> > > precedence (in an OT sort of way) over the syntactic requirements of
> > > noun marking by a determiner.
>
> Now that I've thought about this some more, I see a potential problem. It
> is a rather obvious one to anyone who has worked on the language, so maybe
> the paper deals with it. There are times when sentences begin with
> stess-less elements. For example:
>
> P hascu hihidod?  'What are/were you cooking?'
>
> I would say that _g_ and _p_ are on equal footing here, but according to
> the grammar by Ofelia Zepeda, sentences like this do occur (I pulled that
> example from page 55).
It's been a while since I read the paper, but I don't recall that she
deals with _p_ (or _k_, or _kc_ for that matter) in her paper. I'll
look at it again when I get back to my office on Monday.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu