Re: (tangent thoughts arising from) Active-Ergative langs (discussion)

dirk elzinga wrote:


>Was that Charney's grammar? I haven't looked closely at SR in
>Comanche, but there are bound to be differences from Shoshoni, and
>different people will characterize switch reference differently.
Based on what you said above, Charney's description makes more
sense.  There are quite a few examples in the book where SR and aspect
co-occur though.

>  The little dictionary put out by Lila Wistrand Robinson is a
>piece of crap. Jim Armagost did what he could to save it from complete
>disaster but only partially succeeded.
I tried using that to supplement Charney's book since it doesn't have a
glossary; but I didn't have much luck.  It would have required far more
time than it was worth for the project at hand.

>I'm also not surprised you didn't get final features from Comanche (no
>matter who described it). Final features in Comanche are completely
>lexicalized and only make sense if you know the Shoshoni patterns;
That's what Charney's kept saying.  Which really got annoying, because I
felt like she was giving a historical discussion rather than a synchronic
account.  Left me very clueless.

>Okay. Then Tepa is similar to Muskogean in this respect since I view
>the SR markers as complementizers more than anything else. Interesting
>that they came from case inflection in Muskogean, though.
The difference between the two isn't always clear still.  Relative clauses
can either be marked with switch reference or they can be followed by case
marking.  When to use which is not well understood, from what I've read.

> > In Yuman languages, subordinate clauses aren't marked for tense, but they
> > have switch reference markers.  Only a single set though, like Tepa.
>
>And IIRC, Yuman switch reference markers are the same markers used in
>person inflection, deixis, and t/a.
Looks like it, but I have such little experience in that area that I
couldn't say for sure.

> > In Eskimoan
> > languages SR is part of the 3rd person agreement.
>
>Makes sense; it's only in the 3rd person where this becomes
>potentially ambiguous, no?
Not always.  In Mojave the reciprocal and reflexive are identical, and one
way to distinguish them is through the use of SR.  Using same-subject means
the sentence is reflexive, and the different-subject means the sentence is
reciprocal.    Only the SR marking distinguishes "We killed ourselves" from
"We killed each other."

In Chickasaw you can get subsets of subjects.  "We think that we are tall":
either both "we"'s could refer to the exact same set, or one "we" could be
a subset of the other.  These can get distinguished by same-subject or
different-subject respectively.

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Marcus Smith
AIM:  Anaakoot
"When you lose a language, it's like
dropping a bomb on a museum."
   -- Kenneth Hale
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