Resumen de Figure and ground in the Creek auxiliary oom
The oom auxiliary in the Muskogean language Creek serves a variety of particular uses that can be related through a semantic/pragmatic meaning of ‘ground’, in the Gestalt sense of unformed, diffuse, continuous, below, behind, etc. An examination of the use of oom with stative and active verbs, equational constructions, and question/answer pairs shows its specific semantic/pragmatic interpretations to be ‘enduring’, ‘essence’, ‘ancillary’, ‘constative’, ‘expected’, and ‘given’. The paradigmatic absence of the oom auxiliary signals the Gestalt meaning of‘figure’, specifically ‘temporary’, ‘accidence’, ‘immediate’, ‘performative’, ‘surprising’, and ‘new’. The specific semantic/pragmatic interpretations of oom and its paradigmatic absence are seen to be a result of context such that prediction of which specific meaning will occur in a particular sentence is impossible.
