Obviation in Ojibwe & D-Pronouns in German

Obviation describes a phenomenon prominent in Algonquian languages where third person referents receive additional marking when there is more than one third person referent present in a clause (loosely speaking). However, it also serves certain discourse functions, which makes it difficult to capture in purely syntactic terms. In this collaborative project with Chris Hammerly, we are pursuing the idea that Obviation is a perspectival phenomenon, used to mark (non-)perspective centers. We use data from German D-pronouns, which have been argued to be anti-logophoric, to inform this project, opening up an interesting cross-linguistic comparison of ways to encode perspectival properties.

UPCOMING:

Hammerly, C & A. Göbel (2019). A new perspective on obviation in Ojibwe from attitude contexts. Poster at the 93rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA2019) @New York City, January 2019.

Output:

Hammerly, C & A. Göbel (2018). A “perspective” on obviation from attitude contexts. Talk at 50th Algonquian Conference @University of Alberta, October 2018.

Göbel, A. & Hammerly C. (2017). A new perspective on Obviation in Ojibwe. Talk at SNEWS 2017 @ MIT, December 2017.