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Re: Fourth Persons

From:Aidan Grey <taalenmaple@...>
Date:Thursday, September 4, 2008, 19:48
And Ojibwe is a non_HAS non-Inverse lang too.

They use "empathetic" for the pronoun because in addition to LDR and logophoric
roles, it implies empathy and approval. The sample sentence has a woman using
the empathetic when referring to some kids wanting to learn the language, and
then switching to a non-LDR/logophor/empathetic pronoun when they start acting
like jerks (as kids are wont to do).

As to Obviative and LDR - they don't necessarily need to be the same pronoun, or
to be different morphemes. They're not as necessarily distinct in my mind. One
could use an obviative pronoun as an LDR (and it IS, often, if there's no overt
LDR) just as easily as not. LDR is a syntactic thing to me, and an obviative as
a semantic use could easily be used syntactically as well.

I guess my point is that the 4 points you've discussed don't NEED to be
distinct, in the way that Perfective and Progressive are distinct, for example.
One pronoun could be used for all 4 roles. Especially since there are some of
these roles that are distinctly styntactic and other are distinctly semantic.



----- Original Message ----
From: Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...>
To: CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu
Sent: Thursday, September 4, 2008 11:49:08 AM
Subject: Re: Fourth Persons

On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 19:45:46 -0700, Aidan Grey <taalenmaple@...>
wrote:
>On Obviative - I was mistaken / confused. There's just the one use. The only >variation is how obviation is applied (homans are more likely to be proximal >than obviative, over animals and so on) and on what level it applies >(sentence or discourse level). It's used in Algonquian languages, Wappo, and >Northern Pomo, among others -
>the last two of which are non-HAS non-Inversion langs, if my resources >(incomplete as they are) are correct.
That would be really interesting!
>I know I've read about a couple langs that have indefinites AND obviatives, >but since I just read through "Languages of Native North America" twice, I >can't find or remember where it was... >After the email, I read through the relevant bits in LoNNA again, and Central >Pomo uses an
>empathetic pronoun
What's that? "Empathy", not "emphasis"? not "independence"?
>in both logophoric (reporting) and long-distance refelxive contexts. At least, >if I understood it all correctly, it does. Other Pomoan langs and the nearby >Wappo (again) do to. Looks like Pomoan langs can do everything, though not >necessarily with the same pronoun.
Thanks again, Aidan!
>To be honest, to me, I'm not sure that some of these distinctions really are >there. That is, it seems to me that Logoporic and long-distance reflexives >could easily be extensions of one another, and don't seem all that necessarily >separate morphological processes.
Apparently the experts do consider things like how logophoric the LDRs in a given language are; for all I know they also consider how LDR-ic the logophors in a given language are.
>Same goes for Obviative and LDRs.
This I'm afraid I don't get. (But you could be right anyway; that I don't understand it doesn't imply that it isn't the correct analysis.) Anyway I'd imagine that if a 'lang had two or more such features, it needn't necessarily use non-homphonous means to implement them. Or, it might. If what you've said the Pomoan languages "look like" is entirely correct, then among them they illustrate both using the same pronoun for different "4th- person" features, and using different pronouns for different "4th-person" features.
>I'll say though that I'm VERY far from being an expert on these,
So am I.
>and I could be wrong.
So could I.
>Aidan
Thanks, Aidan!