Re: CHAT: Pima determiners

On Wed, 22 Nov 2000, Marcus Smith wrote:

> Dirk Elzinga wrote:
>
> >On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, Marcus Smith wrote:
> >
> > > I understand the point of view. I'm studying Pima right now, and its
> > > determiner system is leaving me confused. The article 'heg' never modifies
> > > a noun before the auxiliary, but modifies almost all of them after the
> > > verb. But so far it seems to be completely optional. It gets used with
> > > nouns and names. But sometimes there is a demonstrative instead of 'heg',
> > > and I'm not sure if there is a reason or if my consultant just feels like
> > > translating things that way. Very perplexing. Very fun.
> >
> >I won't say a thing; not a thing. Even though I *really* want to ...
>
> Say anything you would like. We are have reached the stage where we are
> allowed to consult any reference we like, so you wouldn't be spoiling
> anything for me. In fact, I would love to hear something I didn't know
> about. There is no pattern in the data available to me yet.
Cool. Okay; 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.

Akimel O'odham (aka Pima) may be different but the pattern you
described sounds about the same. Now if you're talking about
syntactic/semantic behavior, I can't help you.

Dirk (who really wishes he could sit in on a Pima Field Methods class)

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