Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: CHAT: Pima determiners

From:SMITH,MARCUS ANTHONY <smithma@...>
Date:Thursday, November 23, 2000, 5:39
On Wed, 22 Nov 2000, dirk elzinga wrote:

> 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.
That certainly makes sense, as the determiner is always unstressed. However, in Pima, the form is _heg_ (following normal Uto-Aztecan orthography patterns. This actually isn't what I find wierd. The determiner is optional in post-verbal situations. For example, I have received both of the following sentences. Hascu aak am ha-nolav Melissa heg komkjidh? Hascu aak am ha-nolav heg Melissa heg komkjidh? 'Why did Melissa buy a tortoise?' I see not syntactic or prosodic reasons for the presence/absence of _heg_ in these examples. When pressed, he prefers the forms with _heg_ present. Perhaps there is some subtle difference in topic/focus. I just don't know, but it is a point I'm going to keep my eye on as I work on the more interesting portions of the grammar.
> 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.
I am a syntactician. So the phonology is almost irrelevant to me. (Sorry.) On the other hand, I really like the problems with reduplication; but that is practically morphology. :) Marcus