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Home , Demonstrative, Obviative, Part of speech

Monica Macaulay DRAFT last updated 3/8/13 1

Chapter 3 Basic Concepts

1. Introduction

This chapter introduces some basic concepts and facts about Menominee will be needed to understand the material in subsequent chapters. Here we look at parts of speech, person, , obviation, and types.

2. Parts of speech

Different have different inventories of parts of speech. ’s safe to say that virtually all languages have and , but beyond that we find a lot of differences. According to Bloomfield, Menominee has the following parts of speech:

(1) Menominee Parts of Speech (Bloomfield 1962:25) • Nouns • Verbs • • Particles • Negator

There are also (which come before ) and lots of suffixes (which come after words). The prefixes are discussed briefly below, and both the prefixes and suffixes are discussed further in Chapters 4, 5, and 6. Brief discussion of each of the parts of speech appears in this chapter, and more detail is given in later chapters.

2.1. Nouns

We all learn in school that nouns describe a “person, place, or thing.” That works for many nouns, but not necessarily all of them. For example, it leaves out abstract concepts like joy or independence. In Menominee, beyond looking at the meaning, can tell if something is a by the following factors (among other things):

(a) whether it can be pluralized (by -ak or -an), (b) whether it can have the locative ending -eh added, (c) whether it can be possessed (using the three person-marking prefixes discussed below) (d) whether it can have a (like eneh ‘that (inan.)’ or enoh ‘that (an.)’) before it.

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2.2. Verbs

‘Verb’ is a lot harder to define than ‘noun’. Verbs express actions as well as states of being. But can also express existence, occurrence, relationships between people and objects, etc. Menominee is a very verb-oriented , and you’ll find that verbs in Menominee often express much more information than verbs in English do.

For example, eskōthkaew is a Menominee verb meaning ‘ or makes a fire’. Notice that it’s just one in Menominee, but it contains the concept of creating something (a fire) and what that something is (the fire). It also tells you is doing the action (‘he or she’).

Another thing that surprises some people is that concepts expressed by are often expressed by verbs in Menominee. So for example, maehkīw means ‘it is red’, but it’s a verb, not an .

You can identify verbs by the prefixes that some of them take, and by the very large number of suffixes that most of them take. These will be explained in Chapter 5.

2.3. Pronouns

Pronouns are words that substitute for nouns, like ‘she’ or ‘that’ (wenah or eneh/enoh in Menominee). In fact, there are several different subcategories of pronouns. Personal pronouns, for example, are the ones that indicate people and things: ‘I, you, he, she, it, we, they’ and so on. Demonstrative pronouns are usually described as pointing to a thing. They can either be used as a substitute for a noun (like saying ‘I want that’) or with a noun (as in ‘I want that bike’).

Pronouns are a little tricky in Menominee because they can be inflected – that is, they can have different endings on them. They are discussed in depth in Chapter 8.

2.4. Particles

‘Particle’ is a huge category that Bloomfield used for any word that does not inflect (i.e. words that never have any endings on them). These are sometimes characterized as the “little words,” but the fluent speaker elders will always tell you that using them right makes all the difference in the world in a Menominee sentence. Unfortunately, sometimes they’re very hard to translate into English. We can group particles into various subcategories, as will be shown in Chapter 7.

You can see the diversity of meaning that particles have by just considering the small sampling in (2):

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(2) anāmepik ‘under the water’ enāk ‘I don’t know, I’m not sure’ kēwāc ‘mistakenly, wrong’ māwaw ‘all, everything’ mesek ‘and, also, again’ nahāw ‘yes, all right, come on; well, well then; you’re welcome’ new ‘emphatic, contrast; precision, selective’ nīwinoh ‘four times’ sew ‘actually; rather, as it were; like, as if; just, simply’ yōhpeh ‘now, today’

2.5. Negator

The main negator in Menominee is kan ‘no, not’. Bloomfield gave it its own because it didn’t really fit into any of the other categories. It seems most like a particle, but it has some inflected forms (forms with suffixes on them), which excludes it from that category. Table 1 lists the negators in Menominee, including all of the inflected forms of kan plus the two other negators (kat and pōn) and the verbal order that each one goes along with. (Orders and the names for the categories are explained in Chapter 5.)

MENOMINEE ENGLISH CATEGORY ORDER kan not non-predicative Conjunct kan not indicative Negative kawen it is said not to be quotative Negative kan-q is it not? interrogative Negative kapaq but it was not preterit Negative kasaq so it is not present Negative kasapetok I wonder if it isn’t dubitative Negative kat not (unexpected, surprising) mirative Conjunct pōn not imperative Imperative Table 1: Menominee Negators

3. Person

In , “person” refers to a division of the world into three parts:

• first person: speaker • second person: hearer • third person: everyone and everything else

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There are some additional distinctions made to this categorization in Menominee (and in many other languages of the world) involving and subcategories of third person, but these three are the basic building blocks. The three persons are realized in Menominee in some contexts by prefixes, and in other contexts by full pronouns (and sometimes by both). (These contexts and a fuller description of the pronouns appear in Chapters 5 and 8.) Table 2 illustrates the singular prefixes and basic singular personal pronouns of Menominee:

PERSON WHO ENGLISH PRONOUN 1 speaker I nenah ne- 2 hearer you kenah ke- 3 everyone, everything else he, she, it wenah o-/w- Table 2: Person (Singular Examples)

4. Animacy

All nouns in Menominee are classified into one of two categories: animate and inanimate. This is similar to the classification of nouns into masculine and feminine in languages like Spanish and French.

Usually you can guess about the animacy of a particular noun just by considering whether it’s living or not living. But sometimes the language can surprise you. Bloomfield’s grammar (1962:28-36) provides some categories of nouns that are generally animate. Table 3 lists those categories and an example of each:

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ANIMATE NOUNS CATEGORY EXAMPLE people enniw man animals anm dog spirits awtok spirit trees/large wood anēp elm parts of the body nekhsehkwan my wrist bodily fluids saehkōm saliva plants sēwāpemen sweet corn tobacco, etc. ohpuakan pipe some natural objects anāh star shells/beads/china mēkes shell clothing/accessories moswn shawl moving machines otācekwan car playing cards kānōw diamond card Table 3: Animate Noun Categories (Bloomfield 1962:28-36)

Beyond this, though, there are also some unpredictable cases. Table 4 gives some examples of animate and inanimate pairs:

ANIMATE INANIMATE ketāqsowak popcorn ketāqsan popped rice anōhkan raspberry athemen strawberry nekqtek my knee naehtūhkwan my elbow maeqtek tree, big piece of wood maeqtek stick Table 4: Animate/Inanimate Pairs

Note that this is a classification that is mostly based on meaning (except for the exceptions). That is, you can’t tell by the form of a singular noun (how it sounds, or by an ending) whether it is animate or inanimate; you have to know its meaning and in some cases whether it’s an exception. This may lead you to wonder what the point is – why does the language have these two categories? The answer is that this division of nouns into animate and inanimate is reflected in various ways in the grammar of the language. Here are some examples:

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ANIMATE INANIMATE suffix enniw-ak ‘men’ wēkiam-an ‘houses’ demonstrative pronouns enoh ‘that (animate)’ eneh ‘that (inanimate)’ verbs: depending on pāpaehcen ‘s/he falls’ pāpaehnaen ‘it falls’ verbs: depending on nenwāw ‘I see him’ nenmen ‘I see it’ Table 5: Animacy in Menominee Grammar

We can see from Table 5 that the form of the plural suffix depends on animacy, the form of the demonstrative that goes with a noun depends on animacy, and the suffixation on verbs depends on the animacy of either its subject or object. So it’s important to know the animacy of every noun in order to choose the right plural suffix, as well as the right verb form and other words that accompany it in a sentence.

5. Obviation

Obviation is a very interesting property of third person nouns and pronouns in Menominee (that is, excluding the first and second persons, ‘I’, ‘you’, and their plurals). In the third person, a distinction is made between the PROXIMATE (the main character or animate thing) and the (all other characters or animate things). Just like animacy, it gets reflected in various places in a sentence: on the noun itself (in the form of a suffix -an), on (like ‘this’ and ‘that’) and on the verb.

Before we get into an explanation of what obviation is, I should mention that it seems to be disappearing in the speech of the fluent elders. This seems to be a fairly recent development – the speakers I knew in the early 2000s used it at least some of the time, whereas now it’s quite rare to hear it at all.

The first thing to know about obviation is that in Menominee it only applies to animate nouns, never inanimate. (This is a difference from some of the other , where it can apply to inanimate nouns as well.) We can think of it as a subcategory of third person animate: on the one hand we have proximate and on the other hand we have obviative:

third person animate

proximate obviative

Figure 1: Proximate vs. Obviative

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There are two contexts in which obviation plays a role: discourse and grammar. Here I will only address the first. Grammatical obviation, which arises in contexts of possession, is discussed in Chapter 4.

With respect to discourse obviation, then, here’s what Bloomfield has to say about the distinction: “The proximate third person represents the topic of discourse, the person nearest the speaker’s point of view, or the person earlier spoken of and already known” (1962:38). That is, in connected discourse (conversation or narration or other types of speech), one person (or other animate entity) is singled out to be the proximate main character (in the spotlight, as it were), and all other animate third persons are obviative (in the background).

Bloomfield (1962:38) gives the following two contrasting examples to illustrate how a speaker can use obviation to shift the “spotlight” in the sentence. (In these sentences, I’ve put a word-for-word translation between the Menominee and the English translation so that you can see what each word means.)

(3) ‘Man’ is proximate, ‘woman’ is obviative: pes-onāpew enoh enniw enes anenoh metmohs-an ’s mk-apēnet come that man there that.OBV woman-OBV PRT sit.OBV ‘That man came and seated himself there where that woman (obv.) was sitting’

(4) ‘Woman’ is proximate, ‘man’ is obviative: pes-onāpew-an anenoh enniw-an enes enoh metmoh ’s mk-apēt come-OBV that.OBV man-OBV there that woman PRT sit ‘That man (obv.) came and seated himself there where that woman was sitting’

In (3), since ‘man’ is proximate, that participant in the sentence is the main character. The sentence might come from a story about a man and what he did. Notice that the proximate does not have any special marking – there’s no suffix on the noun, a regular demonstrative is used (enoh ‘that (an.)’), and the verb just has its regular marking (in this case the -w suffix that marks third person, ‘he’). The woman in this sentence is obviative, so she is the less central character in the story. The noun ‘woman’ has the obviative suffix -an on it, an obviative demonstrative (anenoh) is used, and the verb ‘was sitting’ has an /n/ in it, which marks obviation.

In (4), on the other hand, ‘woman’ is proximate, and has no special marking. In this case ‘man’ is obviative, and this time that shows up on the noun (with the suffix -an), the demonstrative, and the verb (which in this case carries a suffix -an). So here the sentence might be from a story about a woman and what she did. The man would be the less central character in this story.

It’s important to notice that both sentences mean the same thing – that is, they describe exactly the same situation. So obviation does not change the meaning, just the way in which the speaker draws your attention to the relative importance of the two characters.

Here are few things to keep in mind about obviation: Monica Macaulay DRAFT last updated 3/8/13 8

• only one person or animate thing per clause can be proximate; all others are obviative • the proximate character is unmarked (no suffix is attached) • the distinction only arises when there is more than one animate third person involved (so in an interaction between, for example, a first and a third person (‘I’ and ‘he’ or ‘she), the distinction does not arise and the third person is treated as proximate) • which character gets chosen as proximate is completely up to the speaker, and the speaker can switch a character from proximate to obviative (or vice versa) whenever they feel it is warranted (whenever they want to focus on a different character).

6. Verb Types

This section covers some important subcategories of verbs, having to do with transitivity, and the animacy of the subject or object. These categories play an essential role in determining the ways in which prefixes and suffixes are used with verbs in Menominee.

6.1. Transitivity

Verbs can be either transitive or intransitive. (There are actually a couple of other categories, such as ditransitive, that we’ll cover in Chapter 5.) Transitivity has to do with whether the verb just has a subject, or whether it has a subject and an object. Just to review, subjects and objects are briefly defined and exemplified in (5) and (6):1

(5) Subject: The participant in a sentence which performs an action, is in a state, or experiences an emotion or physical sensation, etc. Sometimes, as in (d), it can also be the participant that undergoes an action. In English, the subject usually comes first in a sentence, although not always. The subject is underlined in each of the examples below: a. The baby is crying. b. Wow, that baby is really loud! c. The kids broke a glass. d. The glass broke.

(6) Object: The participant in a sentence which undergoes an action, has something done to him, her, or it, or is perceived. Objects usually come after the verb in English, as in the following: a. I rocked the baby in my arms. b. Do you hear the baby? c. The kids broke a glass. d. They ran up a whopping bill.

As we’ll see, subjects and objects tend to have the same sorts of meanings in Menominee as they do in English, but their position with respect to the verb can be very different. Furthermore,

1 The definition of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ is actually a very difficult and controversial issue in . Here I give fairly basic definitions which should cover most cases. Monica Macaulay DRAFT last updated 3/8/13 9 because Menominee puts so much information into the verbal prefixes and suffixes, often it’s not even necessary to use a noun to indicate the subject or object.

Example (7) illustrates some intransitive verbs – those which do not take an object – in Menominee:

(7) apēmakat ‘it sits’ aqciahnaew ‘he, she, it (animate) sneezes’ kecīckiwaew ‘it creaks’ mēcehsow ‘he, she, it (animate) eats’ nepw ‘he, she, it (animate) sleeps’ pqnan ‘it snows’

As we said, transitive verbs do take an object. In this case we’re just talking about a direct object, which is usually the person or thing that is affected by the action of the verb. (Later we’ll go into more detail about objects.) Consider the verbs in (8):

(8) akēmw ‘he or she counts him, her, it (animate)’ anām ‘he or she boils it (inanimate)’ kāhtenam ‘he or she pushes it (inanimate)’ nww ‘he or she sees him, her, it (animate)’ osāqsapyatam ‘he or she stretches it (inanimate)’ pemēnōtawaew ‘he or she accepts him, her, it (animate)’

Notice that some of the verbs in (8) have animate objects, and some of them have inanimate objects. As we will see below and in Chapter 5, this is an important factor in figuring what suffixes can be added to a verb.

One thing to keep in mind is that Menominee verbs and their English translations don’t always seem that parallel:

(9) ahpēhcewaepaenam ‘he or she flings it so hard’ kāhtāhkonaew ‘he or she pushes him, her, it (animate) into something solid’ maehsnehtam ‘he or she finds it useful, profitable’ nākasōhtam ‘he or she listens to it’ peskōnawaew ‘he or she misses him, her, it (animate) in shooting’ wēqsakenawmw ‘he or she makes him or her angry by speech’

In all of these cases, the verb is a simple transitive (with a subject and an object) in Menominee, but it requires extra words to express the notion in English. It’s as if the translations from (9) were like this:

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(10) he or she [flings-so-hard] it he or she [pushes-into-something-solid] him, her, it (animate) he or she [finds-useful, profitable] it he or she [listens to] it he or she [misses-in-shooting] him, her, it (animate) he or she [makes-angry-by-speech] him or her

In (10), I’ve put brackets around the meaning that the verb expresses, and moved the object out to the right of the bracketed part. That way you can see the mismatch between the simple transitive verbs in Menominee and the multiple-word expressions in English.

6.2. Menominee Verb Subcategories

Verbs in Menominee are categorized according to the animacy of:

• the subject of intransitives, and • the object of transitives.

The following table schematizes this:

SUBJECT OBJECT ANIMATE INTRANSITIVE AI animate INANIMATE INTRANSITIVE II inanimate TRANSITIVE ANIMATE TA animate TRANSITIVE INANIMATE TI inanimate Table 6: Verbs and Animacy

Note that the animacy of the subject of a transitive doesn’t matter for this categorization. And of course intransitives don’t have objects.

As you can see from the table, there are traditional abbreviations for each verb type. They may seem confusing at first but after a while they’ll be like second nature to you. To restate the four types in another way, here is how they’re categorized, with some examples:

(11) Intransitives (subject only, no object) a. Animate Intransitive (AI): animate subject pāpaehcen ‘he, she, it (animate) falls’

b. Inanimate Intransitive (II): inanimate subject pāpaehnaen ‘it falls’

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(12) Transitives (subject and object) a. Transitive Animate (TA): nww ‘he or she sees him, her, it (animate)’

b. Transitive Inanimate (TI): nmwah ‘he or she sees it’

The reason that this categorization is important is that each type of verb gets its own set of suffixes (the suffixes provide information such as what the subject is and whether or not it is plural). The suffixes are explained in Chapter 5.

7. More Information

ADD: if you want to learn more about kan, kat, and pōn, see Macaulay (2003).