Conlangery #108: Obviation

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Announcements:

• David Salo talking at WiGL on April 11, in Madison, WI, USA
• The Sixth Language Creation Conference will be on April 25-26 in Horsham, UK

Bianca joins us today for an episode on obviation, just another option for managing discourse while clarifying who does what to who. Also, we have a couple interesting digressions on direct/inverse verb agreement systems and George’s hindsight on the appropriateness of a certain story.

Links and Resources:

• A little introduction to obviation
• “Focus, obviation, and word order in East Cree“
• “Obviation as discourse structure in Swampy Cree acimowin“
• “Syntactic direction and obviation as empathy-based phenomena: a typological approach“
• “THE OBVIATION HIERARCHY AND MORPHO SYNTACTIC MARKEDNESS“
• “Obviation, Inversion, and Topic Rank in Ojibwa“