Obviativethird person is a grammatical-personclusivity marking that distinguishes a non-salient third-person referent from a more salient third-person referent in a given discourse context. The obviative is sometimes referred to as the "fourth person".
Comparison with other grammatical-person marking systems
In English and other European languages, the principal means of distinguishing between multiple third-person referents is using gender or reflexive. Thus, in "she saw him," it is clear that there are two third persons because they are of different genders. In "she saw her," it is clear that there are two third persons because otherwise, one would say "she saw herself." However, "she saw her mother" is ambiguous: it could mean that she saw her own mother or that she saw someone else's mother. This is because it is not clear, in some contexts, if "she" and "her" refer to the same person. An obviative/proximate system has a different way of distinguishing between multiple third-person referents. When there is more than one third person named in a sentence or discourse context, the most important, salient, or topical is marked as "proximate" and any other, less salient entities are marked as "obviative." Subsequent sentences that refer to previously-named entities with pronouns or verbal inflections can then use the proximate and obviative references that have already been established to distinguish between the two. For example, in the sentence "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog," there are two third-person referents, the fox and the dog. Thus, one of them has to be proximate and the other one has to be obviative, depending on which one the speaker considers more central to the story. If the fox is the more important one, the sentence might look something like "the quick brown fox-PROX jumped-PROX>OBV the lazy dog-OBV," where PROX>OBV is verbal inflection indicating a proximate subject acting on an obviative object. In that case, a subsequent sentence "and then PROX went-PROX away" would mean that the fox went away. On the other hand, if the dog is the more important one, the sentence might look something like "the quick brown fox-OBV jumped-OBV>PROX the lazy dog-PROX," where OBV>PROX is verbal inflection indicating an obviative subject acting on a proximate object. In that case, the same subsequent sentence "and then PROX went-PROX away" would mean instead that the dog went away. By contrast, an equivalent subsequent sentence in English, such as "and then he went away," would not necessarily indicate whether "he" is the fox or the dog. An analogy that has been used to explain obviation is that the proximate is the entity in the "spotlight," and any other, obviative entities are out of the spotlight or "hangers-on."
The following is a typical example of obviate/proximate morphology in the Eastern dialect of the Algonquian Ojibwe in which the obviative is marked on nouns and demonstratives and reflected in pronominal verb affixes:
'Then this young man dreamed that foreigners would come to kill them.'
That example shows that the proximate referent need not necessarily be the subject of a clause.
Potawatomi
is notable for having two degrees of obviation, "obviation" and "further obviation." "Further obviation" is rare, but when it occurs, a "further obviative" referent, deemed to be even less salient than the obviative referent, can be marked by an additional obviative suffix. The following is the sole example to appear in the literature on Potawatomi:
Charles Hockett posited the following example, but he never checked it to see if it was grammatical:
Obviation in Ingush, a heavily dependent-marking language, is an exception to the generalization that the obviative occurs in head-marking languages. Obviation is not overtly marked in Ingush but is implied, as certain constructions are impossible unless one referent has salience over another. For example, if a non-subject-referent has salience over the subject and precedes the other co-referent, reflexivisation is possible. That is shown in the example below whose non-subject-referent appears to have salience over the subject:
'Musa's dog barked at him.'
If the subject is salient, on the other hand, the subject's possessor does not antecede the third-person object, and the possession must be indirectly implicated as follows:
