Focality and Topicality Marking in Biloxi

The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of two clitics that appear as discourse markers in Biloxi (ISO 639-3 bll) narratives, specifically –di and –yą. While a few Siouanists and other linguists have scratched the surface in identifying and analyzing these clitics, this will be the first attempt at an in-depth analysis of these clitics in Biloxi narratives as focality and topicality markers. Einaudi first examined these particles in her dissertation, A Grammar of Biloxi (1974). Unfortunately, her brief examination concludes with the rather discouraging remark that these clitics “remain the thorniest problem of Biloxi syntax” (1974: 149). With this paper, I attempt to make this problem of Biloxi syntax a little less thorny. Unfortunately, the nature of analyzing an extinct language in which we can no longer elicit help from native speakers for their perceptions about the use of particular clitics means that this philological analysis is, to some degree, necessarily subjective and theoretical. The only data left for us to analyze are the narratives from Biloxi oral tradition and some elicited sentences. The data in this analysis are far from black and white and are indeed rather messy, leaving many unanswered questions and seeming to imply a greater degree of complication and complexity in the language than we may now, without the benefit of native speaker intuition, be able to know for certain. However, these clitics will be analyzed within the theoretical framework called the Givenness Hierarchy (Gundel, 1993), which will hopefully aid in our understanding of their use. Biloxi is an extinct Siouan language. Specifically, it is a member of the Ohio Valley, or Southeastern, branch of the Siouan language family. Its closest known linguistic cousins are Ofo and Tutelo, also extinct. Biloxis were first encountered by Europeans in southern Mississippi in 1699. Later, Biloxis came to inhabit Louisiana and eastern Texas. The remaining Biloxis currently share a small reservation with Tunicas, a linguistically unrelated people, in Marksville, Louisiana. The last known native semi-speaker of Biloxi, Emma Jackson, died in 1934. Biloxi is the best-documented member of the southeastern branch of Siouan, but this is the least studied and documented branch of the Siouan language family. Thus, the analysis and study of Biloxi is of crucial importance, not only for its own sake, but for the knowledge yet to be gained from this little-studied branch of Siouan and the contribution it can make to Siouan studies and to linguistics in general. Biloxi is an agglutinative, head-marking, subject-object-verb (SOV) language. Verbs are the most highly inflected category and are subject to noun incorporation. Biloxi lost the activestative split common in other Siouan languages. In Biloxi, there is no part of speech designated