“Resumptive pronouns” & definiteness effects
The following is excerpted from one of our recent Saturday learning sessions on Zoom, and I think it includes new discoveries.
Definitely a Stick Indian (image credit: Twitter)
It has to do with the 1930s “Chipmunk and His Mother” story told in Jargon by Jack Stillman, a Snoqualmie-Duwamish man.
There, the phrase Stik-Injun, ‘a Stick Indian’, points to a great example of how CW can distinguish between definite ‘the’ and indefinite ‘a’, even though the language hardly has any article. Grand Ronde and early-creolized lower Columbia River CW have uk, which is similar to a definite article. But that form is known more in those southerly/older dialects,a nd less up north.
This is a point that no other Jargon sources will tell you, so pay attention now 🙂
Taking one example sentence from the text as-is, the indefinite:
Stik-Injun weik-sayaa iskam naika
stík-índjən wík-sáyá ískam nayka
woods-Indian not-far take me
‘a Stick Indian [dangerous entity] nearly got me’
(or equally well, ‘I nearly got taken by some Stick Indian’)
…would become a definite reference if you added the famous “resumptive pronoun”. So then, Stik-Injun weik-sayaa yaka/tlaska iskam naika would be ‘The Stick Indian(s) nearly got me.”)
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Following up on this point…in this expression:
Stik-Injun tl’ap maika
stík-índjən t’łáp mayka
woods Indian catch you
‘a Stick Indian will catch you’
(or again, just as logically, ‘you’ll get caught by some Stick Indian’)
…the sense here, as an expression of the mother’s advice, is of a general truth. One clue showing this is that Stik-Injun tl’ap maika again lacks the resumptive pronoun yaka or tlaska, as seen just above. In spoken English we often phrase such broad statements with indefinite nouns and in the future tense – ‘Stick Indians will catch you’.
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A final illustration:
Tenas-man yaka chako…: I understand this as an ordinary CW relative clause, ‘the boy who came (here)…’ Similar to my comments about “resumptive” yaka/tlaska above, I’ll point out that the speaker could have said just tenas-man chako…, which would then have meant ‘a boy coming (here)’ / ‘a boy who came (here)’.
Methinks this is a gallicism.
In standard French, as in English, the two sentences differ solely because of the definite versus indefinite articles: “Un indien m’a attrapé” (indefinite) versus “L’indien m’a attrapé” (definite).
BUT in most forms of non-standard spoken French, subject clitic doubling is common -IF the subject is definite. So whereas “L’indien il m’a attrapé” is possible (indeed, common) in colloquial spoken French, *”Un indien il m’a attrapé” is ungrammatical or at best quite marginal.
Users of Chinook Jargon who spoke fluent French (as an L1 or not) could very easily have come to use the presence of a subject pronoun as a marker of definiteness, following the model of spoken French. I suspect it would have been difficult for them to use any of the demonstratives of Chinook Jargon (including “uk”) as a definite article, because synchronically, the French definite article is no longer connected to any of the demonstratives.
You make a fair suggestion about the source of this structure in Chinuk Wawa, thanks Etienne, I like it. I think it’s equally fair to note that many, or most, dialects of spoken English at the time of CW’s formation also used resumptive pronouns similarly to what you note in French.
Also it’s easy to make the case that the Pacific NW tribal languages had an equivalent of resumptive pronouns, in that noun Subjects (be they pronouns or nouns sensu stricto) were always accompanied by a verb fully inflected for 3rd person.
Some who have read my dissertation will recall that i’ve concluded CW’s “resumptive pronouns” yaka & łaska are in fact verbal agreement markers — in effect, providing the pronominal Subject marking already automatically seen on non-noun Subjects in all persons.
So in that regard, I guess I’ve leaned implicitly toward an Indigenous source for this CW structure. However, I’ve got no problem accepting that a perfect storm led to essentially all source languages simultaneously contributing to the existence of resumptive pronouns in the Jargon!
In fact I guess my view, more typologically informed than beholden to Generativist or other theories, is that resumptive pronouns are likely the norm in the world’s languages.
Dave