Oneida Person Indefiniteness: Usage and Florescence

Oneida (Northern Iroquoian) “feminine/indefinite” (F/I) pro-nominal prefixes are polysemous between an indefinite and a feminine reading. Feminine meaning is more common in texts, explaining speakers’ intuition that this meaning is more basic. Moreover, F/I prefixes are more common in “irrealis” narratives—narratives about ghosts, customs, and memories. Indefinite F/I prefixes may cooccur with indefinite words, e.g., uhkaʔ ok ‘someone’; about half the occurrences of F/I prefixes do so. Conflation of the two meanings is culturally based—positively, in the relation between womanhood and mankind and negatively, in the relation between womanhood and the unimportant.