Abstract
Ponca and Omaha (Siouan: Mississippi Valley: Dhegiha; henceforth OP) are two mutually intelligible, highly endangered languages of the Missouri River Valley. OP are head-final, but frequent postverbal referring expressions have led to OP's being described as free-word-order. On the contrary, I show that postverbal referring expressions occupy a grammatical position, whose use is restricted to antitopics, an information-structural type distinct from topics. The theoretical point of departure is described in §1 and linked to the literature; and I propose a necessary pragmatic condition upon the postverbal position. In §2 I present the qualitative and in §3 the quantitative evidence in support of this condition. I argue in §4 for considering it both necessary and sufficient. An extrasentential analysis of postverbal expressions is considered and rejected in §5. In §6 I compare my findings with findings from genoand phenotypically similar languages. Finally, in §7 I propose a grammaticisation explanation, and then discuss (§8) and conclude (§9).
Highlights
Ponca and Omaha (Siouan: Mississippi Valley: Dhegiha; OP1) are two mutually intelligible, highly endangered languages of the Missouri River Valley
Of the three terms in (3)-(5), the present work only maps the second (4) to a syntactic form; but all three are coded for, because TOPIC/FOCUS status is sufficient for non-ANTITOPIC status, and the identification of ANTITOPICS is made easier by the identification of FOCI and TOPICS
I found 98% of postverbal referring expressions (n=43) to refer to ANTITOPICS. (The one exception is (12) in §2.3.) Of in-situ expressions (n=99), 91% referred to FOCI or TOPICS. (The exceptions are detailed in §4.1-§4.4.) Without further qualitative analysis, these figures provide evidence for phrasing (7) only as a necessary but insufficient condition
Summary
Ponca and Omaha (Siouan: Mississippi Valley: Dhegiha; OP1) are two mutually intelligible, highly endangered languages of the Missouri River Valley. OP are head-final, but frequent postverbal referring expressions have led to OP's being described as "free-word-order". I show that postverbal referring expressions occupy a grammatical position, whose use is restricted to antitopics, an information-structural type distinct from topics. I argue in §4 for considering it both necessary and sufficient.
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