Antitopic and afterthought: Givenness and grammar in Ponca and Omaha

Gordon, Bryan James

doi:10.17161/kwpl.1808.3905

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…All Siouan languages at 5 Rudin field tapes 399 Bryan James Gordon very least permit postsentential referring expressions to clarify one or more verbal arguments, but grammarians have varied in accepting postverbal arguments as elements of the same sentence (cf. Rudin 1998;Ingham 2003: 76;Cumberland 2005: 421;Boyle 2007: 292-293;Gordon 2008). My attention to deaccenting phenomena in this study may shed light on this question and enabling language workers to distinguish between those postverbal arguments which are clearly "outside" the sentences and those which are more likely "inside".…”

Section: Ellipsis and The Contents Of The Vpmentioning

confidence: 85%

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Advances in the study of Siouan languages and linguistics

Rudin¹,

Gordon²

2016

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Beyond honoring a beloved colleague, our aim in this volume is to bring a variety of issues in Siouan linguistics to the attention of the linguistic community. The Siouan language family is a large and important one, with branches geographically distributed over a broad swath of the North American plains and parts of the southeastern United States. This puts it in contact historically with several other families of languages: Algonquian, Iroquoian, Caddoan, UtoAztecan, and Muskogean. Siouan languages are, or were historically, spoken by the members of at least 25 ethnic/political groups. One Siouan language, Lakota, is among the handful of indigenous North American languages with younger speakers today. Siouan languages have occasionally risen to prominence in general linguistics, for instance in the study of reduplication (Shaw 1980); and Omaha and Crow (Apsaalooke) have lent their names to two of the basic categories of kinship systems in anthropology. Nonetheless, the Siouan family has been underrepresented in the descriptive and typological literature, and most of the languages in the family are severely understudied. The majority of work on Siouan languages is unpublished, existing only in the form of conference papers or manuscripts. 2 This volume is a step toward making information on Siouan languages more broadly available and encouraging deeper investigation of the myriad issues they raise.From the perspective of linguistic typology, Siouan languages have many notable features. Many of these features stand to challenge typological generalizations. Here we briefly sketch a few of the most characteristic features of the Siouan family.1 "Siouan" is not to be confused with "Sioux", a controversial term referring to Lakota and Dakota people, rarely to Nakota/Nakoda people too, but never correctly to people of other traditionally Siouan-language-speaking communities. 2 Many of these unpublished works are collected in the electronic Siouan Archive, maintained by John Boyle at the University of California at Riverside. PrefaceAll Siouan languages possess a rich variety of applicative affixes, confirming Polinsky's (2013) observation that applicatives are common in North America and adding another language family to her list of applicative-rich families in the area. Helmbrecht (2006) divides the applicatives into three templatic slots: locative applicatives, benefactive applicatives, and applicative markers; all of the Siouan languages sampled by Helmbrecht possess at least two applicative morphemes.All Siouan languages are strongly head-final, and the consensus among syntacticians working with Siouan languages is that all but the supraclausal projections (and even some of these) are underlyingly head-final in Siouan languages, contra Kayne's (1994) Antisymmetry theory.All Siouan languages have head-internal relative clauses. A series of strong claims regarding the typological implications of head-internal relative clauses (cf. Cole 1987; Murasugi 2000), including purported distinctions between "Japanesetype" a...

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Section: Ellipsis and The Contents Of The Vpmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…In some languages, like Umoⁿhoⁿ Iye and Paⁿka Iye, this use may be (or have been) obligatory. In Gordon (2008), I sampled 51 continuing topics in Umoⁿhoⁿ Iye and Paⁿka Iye and found 42 of them were referred to postverbally. Of the 9 preverbal, most were within repeated collocations.…”

Section: Ellipsis and The Contents Of The Vpmentioning

confidence: 99%

Advances in the study of Siouan languages and linguistics

Rudin¹,

Gordon²

2016

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“…As mentioned, the nature and the function of those entities that we have referred to as détachement instances have been the subject of broad discussion since the 1990s, according to which APCs are often defined as exceptional cases of Topic: anti-Topic (Lambrecht 1981), Topic Continuity in Discourse (Givon 1984), postposed Topic (Lombardi-Vallauri 2009, right edge Topic (Ortega-Santos 2016). Terminology is significant as reveals a conception that directly compares the détachement elements with those occurring in the left periphery of the utterance, participating in the Topic-Comment binary structure 20 .…”

Section: The Apc's Semantic Weaknessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Specifically, APC cannot be a device that exist to reactivate a discourse topic, as assumed in literature (Givon 1984), because this would not allow us to 19 It is no coincidence that in the jumble of random expressions fulfilling the APC we do not find clear forms of modal evaluation, that would presuppose an autonomous attitude. However, it must be recognized that there is a difficulty in prosodically distinguishing cases of APC from Parenthesis occurring at the end of the utterance.…”

Section: The Apc's Semantic Weaknessmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Appendix of Comment according to Language into Act Theory

Cresti¹

2021

CHIMERA

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The article deals with the détachement instances, an aspect of spoken language differing from the binary structure (Topic-Comment) considered to both semantically and informationally form the basic unit of spoken language. According to Language into Act Theory, détachment instances are considered specific information units called Appendix of Comment (APC), with a clear distinction from the Topic unit. The APC may be formally identified in the corpus through its distribution after the Comment and its prosodic performance via a suffix unit. The APC records a frequency value of 4.28% of reference units, which is significantly lower than that of the Topic (close to 20%). The morpho-syntactic fillings of the APC show a kind of “randomness”, that cannot truly be generalized, unlike Topic, since they are employed “in the moment”, as late adjunctions, echoes, repetitions, deictics, and formulas. APC doesn’t constitute a syntactic/semantic island, as Topic does, and its content is ultimately irrelevant, lacks an independent modality and is de-focused. The APC’s features confirm the specificity of its information function in order to textually integrate with the Comment, facilitating an agreement with the addressee, while the Topic serves as the field of application for the illocutionary force. The purpose of the article is to explain the distinction between the previous information functions by demonstrating the specific role of Appendix through examples derived from Italian corpus analysis.

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“…Within the L-AcT framework, they are clearly distinguished and studied (Cresti, 2000 Although APC has already been outlined in section 2.2, it merits further consideration. Some frameworks treat APC as a postponed Topic (Lombardi Vallauri, 2009) or as an anti-topic or afterthought (Gordon, 2008; Averintseva-Klisch, 2008; Shimoyama et al, 2015, among others). L-AcT maintains that the notion of postponed Topic cannot correspond to any IU if we define TOP as the cognitive domain to which the illocution makes reference.…”

Section: Locutive Introducers and Appendicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Short information units

Raso

Santos

2020

J. of Speech Sci.

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Our main goal is to show that short information units (one phonological word immediately preceded and followed by a prosodic boundary, at least one of which with non-terminal value) can be classified only on the basis of their formal prosodic characteristics. That is to say that lexicon and syntax may vary with respect to the informational function, while what formally marks the informational function is the regularity of the prosodic profile of the lexical item. We also maintain that an information unit corresponds to an intonation unit (except in one specific circumstance). We use just one lexeme for the analysis, the Brazilian Portuguese ASSIM, and extract all the occurrences where this lexeme is found in a dedicated prosodic unit in the C-ORAL-BRASIL corpus. According to our analysis, this lexeme can fulfill at least five different information units, i.e. it can fulfill at least five different linguistic functions, recognizable by their prosodic regularities.

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Antitopic and afterthought: Givenness and grammar in Ponca and Omaha

Cited by 4 publications

References 23 publications

Advances in the study of Siouan languages and linguistics

Advances in the study of Siouan languages and linguistics

The Appendix of Comment according to Language into Act Theory

Short information units

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