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

On Sat, 25 Nov 2000, And Rosta wrote:

> [CHAT removed from Subject, because of some Conlang relevance introduced]
>
> 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).

Pima doesn't seem to have sentences like that. Out of a hundred pages of
elicited sentences, I have one sentence that could be construed that way.

Tedhai ha-nolav heg komkjidh? 'Who bought a tortoise?'

_tedhai_ is very possibly _t hedhai_. But a week earlier, I had the same
sentence as _Hedhai ha-nolav heg Komkjidh?_, so I don't know what is going
on. This is something I am keeping my eye on (as well as the strange fact
that _nolav_ 'buy' is almost always marked with a plural object clitic
even when the object is singular).

Marcus