Ćwarmin: A Remnant of A Proximate-Obviative System

Historically, the three levels of definiteness go back to a proximate-obviative system that was rearranged quite a bit. Third person verbs were assumed to refer to proximate arguments unless a prefix - əc- or ok- - was affixed to the verb. However, the system was reanalyzed, and these were lost as a productive obviative marker.

However, some verbs had been reanalyzed. Normally, the obviative argument was a non-subject of the previous sentence (although not always), and this was generalized for a handful of verbs where the most common usage pattern would have the obviative object/indirect object of the previous verb be the subject of this verb. Most of these are verbs that express a reaction in response to the previous verb, on the part of an object or recipient, thus making sense for these verbs to be reinterpreted as having as subject the object/indirect object of the previous verb. Examples include:

okkaulan - resist
əctəriln - answer, respond
ecnitren - obey
ecsidten - refuse
okratun - to answer 'yes'
əcgettin - to answer 'no'
okruncan - fall over from being pushed or otherwise kinetically affected
əcritən - to deny an accusation or allegation
(əc)lədilən - to politely refuse an offer
(ok)samawan - to succumb to something, or to lose

With first or second person arguments, these have no exceptional syntactical behavior. A proximate subject can be obtained by having an explicit, non-dropped subject pronoun in front of them. Thus, the obviative behavior only really applies when pronouns have been dropped (which, granted, is very common in Ćwarmin).

So, a couple examples:

baustuno okkaulunuv - we fought (them) and they resisted

kartapur fird  -erəś     fird-iŋ-itəś          nəmirəmcə              e      ecsidt-əmcə
tax-man debt -def.abl debt-or-acc.spec demand-past.recent and refuse-past.recent 

The tax man just tried collecting taxes from a person and the person refused. As lexical remarks go it is notable that taxes are considered a type of debt, so kart-apur (taxation-(mandate-agent) collects, in essence a 'debt', fird. However, the debtor has not done anything particular to become in debt, but is so without any agency of his own, and thus the non-volitional agentive noun form -irŋi is used, instead of the volitional agentive form.