Topic, Focus, and Point of View in Blackfoot

Languages vary in the ways in which they express various notions of discourse prominence, such as topic, focus, and point of view. In the Algonquian language family, such notions are grammaticalized via two morphosyntactic mechanisms: obviation and direct/inverse. Obviation and direct/inverse are typically conceived of as working together as a single concerted system, both marking the same type of discourse prominence. This paper argues that, in Blackfoot (Plains Algonquian: Alberta and Montana), obviation and direct/inverse are in fact distinct, each marking a different type of discourse prominence. §1 highlights properties of the obviation and direct/inverse systems of Blackfoot and §2 offers evidence for distinguishing obviation from direct/inverse. In §3, direct/inverse in Blackfoot is argued to grammaticalize the pragmatic notion of point of view and in §4, obviation is argued to grammaticalize information structuring, or topic and focus. In §5 is the conclusion.