Coreference

 Kashaya
Grammar

Speakers of any language have to keep constant track of reference to different individuals when telling a story or describing an event. In English, pronouns such as he, she, they help with this, since they distinguish the gender of single individuals and also whether there is more than one person. Kashaya makes exactly the same distinctions using the pronouns mu·kinʔ, manʔ, and ma·caʔ, but this still leaves a lot of ambiguity when several individuals are part of the discussion. The issue really only arises for third-person pronouns, since first and second-person reference depends on the people who are directly interacting in the conversation.

Unlike English, Kashaya has special terms that explicitly indicate reference to an individual who has already been mentioned; in English, this is a bit like saying he himself, or her own (mother). Oswalt calls these reflexive forms, but that is a somewhat unusual use of the term, so I will call them coreferential, since they share reference with a preceding part of the sentence. A related concept in linguistics is a logophoric pronoun, for verbs that describe someone's speech, thoughts, or feelings; this is just one possible use of the coreferential pronouns in Kashaya.

There are two major contexts where coreference is expressed: in the third-person pronouns, and in the third-person possessive prefixes of kinship terms.

Pronouns

The coreferential pronoun in Kashaya is /ti/, plus the different case forms based on it. Alternatively, the clitic /yac/ can be added, with the case forms associated with that element; this conveys a certain respect or agency, but also seems to be common when the meaning is plural.

ti ~ ti· tiyaʔ he himself, she herself, they themselves as the agent of a verb
tito tiya·col (to) him, her, them (self); his, her, their (own) as the patient of a verb, object of a postposition, body-part possessor
tiʔkʰe tiya·coʔkʰe for him, her, them (self); his, her, their (own) as a benefactive or general possessor
titoʔna tiya·coʔna where he, she is / they are; at his, her, their (own) place at a location associated with the coreferent

The following examples illustrate the use of the coreferential pronoun in its basic form, as the agent or actor in its clause.

These sentences illustrate the patient, undergoer, or body-part possessive function.

These show the benefactive ("for") or general possession.

The locative form is not common, but occurs in the next sentence.

Notice that the first mention of the reference, to which the /ti/ form also refers, does not need to be in the same sentence (first example), but can simply be part of the preceding context (second example).

Since multiple individuals may be part of the discussion, it is more precise to say that /ti/ makes reference to the one who is currently the focus of the narrative, which is related to the agent role in the switch reference system. [More examples need to be collected to illustrate this pattern in Kashaya. O'Connor and Mithun discuss the same issue in Northern and Central Pomo.]

Kinship possession

In addition to the coreferential pronouns, Kashaya kinship terms have a special possessive prefix /ma-/ that has the same coreferential function for the person in the kin relation, as opposed to /miya-/ that is non-coreferential possession.

In contrast, the following examples illustrate non-coreferential /miya-/.

The coreferential kinship terms seem to have stricter requirements about where the possessor appears in the syntactic structure – perhaps as the subject of the full sentence. This observation might be related to the fact that they express possession, in which case forms like /tiʔkʰe/ might have a similar restriction. More investigation is required.

These sentences include /ti/ forms as well as kinship terms.