Re: Question about anaphora

In a message dated 5/30/2003 6:13:36 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
stoiberh@INODE.AT writes:


>Given that my conlang has no grammatical gender, what are the options for
>realizing a helpful system of anaphora? I bet that there is more than one
way
>and I simply want to get to know a few before I make my ultimate decision
>for my own conlang-baby.

Are you familiar with the proximate/obviative distinction found in some North
American languages?

I'm sure someone here can explain it better than I can, but essentially in
any sentence (or longer stretch of discourse, depending on the language), one
noun is "proximate" (and morphologically unmarked) and  the others carry an
"obviative" suffix.  You can then have pronouns (or verb endings) that indicate
whether the antecedent (or subject) was proximate or obviative.

Doug