A second type of fourth person reference-switching?
68 009 sNP Ø-V
Giant exists. 011
a
spNP bi-NP Ø-V White Painted Woman’s children are being born.
013 sNP go-yi-Ø-V
Giant eats them from her. [exit Giant, children] 014 sNP
Ø-V White Painted Woman goes about weeping.
a
pNP = possessor NP, coindexed with the possessor pronominal bi- immediately following. sx denotes that x is the subject of the verb.
The fourth person object pronominal go- coding White Painted Woman marks the content of clause 013 as significant in the development of the narrative the narrative will recount how White Painted Woman succeeds in foiling Giant and raises a child. Also, there is undoubtedly a
significant degree of tension in the engagement between Giant and White Painted Woman here and again the choice of the fourth person pronominal registers this.
Hoijer does not gloss the fourth person pronominal and the postposition kaa- go-aa- in the verb of clause 013 in passage 68, kaayinłⁿdé
‘he eats them from her’, but the addition of the pronominal and postposition creates a transitive construction and enables the coding of the non- agent by fourth person for highlighting. Similarly, in “The Killing of the Giant” Hoijer’s English translations of clauses 086 and 090 in passage
62 include no gloss of the fourth person and the postposition to which it is attached, ká- go-á- ‘indicated to’‘slid along for him’, but it seems that in these clauses also the fourth person and postposition function to include a reference to the non-agent participant and to create a
transitive construction. Probably ká- ‘stood up for him’ in clauses 108 and 114, and ka- go-aa- ‘not afraid of him’ in clause 116 in passage 59, function similarly and these Hoijer does gloss though in English clauses 114 and 116 would have made sense in context if they were
reduced to ‘Giant stood up’ and ‘he is not afraid’.
4.5 A second type of fourth person reference-switching?
We have seen that the pre-quotative with which fourth person reference-switching occurs in Mithlo’s narratives in Hoijer 1938 is sNP oNP yi-Ø-V. It is Mithlo’s most frequently occurring pre-quotative; 2223 of the transitive pre-quotatives in Mithlo’s narratives are of this form in the absence
of fourth person tracking. In Kenoi’s narratives, the most frequently occurring pre-quotative is sNP bi-Ø-V; two thirds of the transitive pre- quotatives in Kenoi’s narratives are of this form in the absence of fourth person tracking.
In Kenoi’s “Coyote and Beetle” clauses 010–022 in passage 69, in a succession of same-non-agent units the pre-quotatives are all of the same form, sNP bi-Ø-V, in clauses 010, 013, 018, and 021, and the point of view of the two participants Coyote and Beetle is taken alternately but
the point of view is with the non-agent, not the agent as it was when the pre-quotatives were all sNP oNP yi-Ø-V section 4.1. Beetle had been standing on his head and, now rightways up,
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claims to have been hearing what is being said under the ground:
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As Hoijer translates clauses 008 and 009, the implication is that Coyote is standing next to Beetle but 007–009 are one sentence and by parallel processing in complex sentences see section 2.1.3 there is a change in the reference of the subject between 008 and 009. 009 seems to be saying that Beetle is now no longer
standing on his head but is standing rightways up next to Coyote, about to engage him in dialogue man-to-man.
69 004 sNP Ø-V
Coyote speaks: 005
“Eating fat I go about,” 006
yi-Ø-V he says to him Beetle.
007 “I eat you right away,”
008 yi-Ø-V
-go he Coyote saying to him-SUB,
009 bi-Ø-V
he Beetle is standing next to him. 010 sNP
bi-Ø-V Beetle speaks to him:
012 “I heard something someone says.”
013 sNP bi-Ø-V
Coyote speaks to him: 014
“Tell me what someone is saying,” 017
bi-Ø-V he says to him.
018 sNP bi-Ø-V
Beetle speaks to him: 019
“They look for someone who defecated on a rock.” 021 sNP
bi-Ø-V Coyote speaks to him:
022 “Well, wait right here for me while I go and put matters right.”
This is the passage that is quoted by Webster 2006:14f who comments that the bi-coding in 013, 017, and 021 above of Beetle “indicates an elevation in local importance of Beetle” at these points. He also points out that initially Beetle is coded by the yi- form of the third person object
in 006 and 008 above when Coyote first addresses him in clauses 004–009 the default third person participant reference strategy is used. It is when the dialogue assumes a degree of confrontation that the object coding of Beetle changes from the yi- form to the bi- form of the third person
so that both Coyote and Beetle are coded by proximate bi-. Again, in the absence of yi-bi- alternations, all pre-quotatives contain an sNP. There is just one other passage, passage 70 below, in Kenoi’s Coyote stories, clauses 015–020 in “Coyote Misses Real Rabbit”, in which,
when allowable that is, when the object is postpositional, not direct as in clauses 018 and 020—see section 2.1.3, the verb forms are all bi-Ø-V, whether the non-agent is Coyote or the rabbit. Coyote has ignored a rabbit lying beside the road which experience suggested to him would be a
dead rabbit filled with rocks, but when Coyote has passed the rabbit jumps up: 70 015
oNP bi-Ø-V He runs after the rabbit.
016 bi-Ø-V
He rabbit ran from him into a dead tree. 017
bi-Ø-V He Coyote lies toward him rabbit.
018 yi-Ø-V -go ‘Doing’ him in vain-SUB
019 bi-Ø-V
he reaches toward him again and again. 020
oNP yi-Ø-V He caught hold of the rabbit but the rabbit is not done for.
However, whereas in 69 any NP with a verb bi-Ø-V was a subject NP, in 70 in clause 015 the NP with a verb bi-Ø-V is an object NP, a clause of the exceptional type in which bi- has a “focusing function” section 2.1.4.2. One example of clauses of this type, passage 18, was taken from
the same narrative as 70 and overlapping with it, clauses 008-016. In 70, in clauses 017 and 019 there is no NP, but it is most likely that the bi-clauses in 70 exemplify the same focusing function.
In clauses 010–022 of “Coyote and Beetle” passage 69 with all pre-quotatives sNP bi-Ø-V, there were no post-quotatives go-Ø-V and therefore no manifestation of fourth person reference-switching in that particular passage. Canonical same-non-agent units sNP bi-Ø-V: “Quote,”
go-Ø-V have been found but only when the point of view does not alternate between the two participants. Those passages are to be discussed in section 5.
Nevertheless, it seems a syntactic possibility that a canonical sNP bi-Ø-V: “Quote,” go-Ø-V construction could have occurred in passage 69 but, with the very few examples that there are in the corpus of bi-Ø-V occurring in a succession of same-non-agent units the point of view
alternating between the participants, it is impossible to say whether the absence of any go-Ø-V selected over bi-Ø-V in them in a post-quotative or non-quotative might be happenstance or not.