Double-Obviatives and Direction-Marking in Kutenai

Kutenai morphosyntax exhibits both direction-marking and obviation. Direction is a binary distinction that characterizes transitive clauses in terms of the relative rank of the clause's two arguments. Obviation is a binary distinction that characterizes noun phrases in terms of their relative rank insofar as it distinguishes the most highly-ranked NP in a sentence from any and all other NPs in the sentence. While recognized as distinct phenomena, obviation and direction-marking are widely thought to interact as follows. The relative rank of arguments is determined by obviation status, and obviation status, in turn, is determined largely by pragmatic and semantic factors. Despite the widespread acceptance of this view, the central aim of this paper is to argue that there are good grounds for questioning it. I'll argue that there is a class of cases—double-obviative constructions—that the standard view does not account for. The import of these cases is not that they are exceptions per se , but that the attempt to account for them reveals that the received view is problematic even in the standard cases. In the first instance, accounting for double-obviative constructions leads to the conclusion that obviation status is not needed to mediate between discourse and semantic considerations on the one hand, and direction-marking, on the other. But closer examination shows that instead of simply being superfluous, the received view seems to fundamentally reverse the order of priority between discourse decisions that the speaker makes and the linguistic encoding of these decisions. While this paper deals exclusively with Kutenai, its conclusion may have implications for discussions of obviation and direction in Algonquian languages as well.