Koefoed (1979) on lack of CJ compound prepositions

[David Robertson]

Geert Koefoed's article in the volume edited by Ian Hancock (1979) on 
pidgins & creoles discusses (page 51) the apparent lack of compound 
prepositions in Jargon.

This term seems to refer to item (g) in his list of traits widely noted 
among European-language-based pidgins & creoles:

"development of compound prepositions of the type [preposition] + noun + 
[genitive]" (page 49)

Examples of such a "pidgin/creole" (!) construction are English "at the 
foot of (the mountain, etc.)," "at the head of (the trail, etc.)," and "to 
the heart of (the matter, etc.)."  

I agree that we don't find many of these in Chinook Jargon.  Anybody know 
of good real examples?  When I read constructions like this in Father Le 
Jeune's newspaper, they sound very French-based to me.  

But a person also has to be careful not to confuse similar phrases with 
compound prepositions.  For example, in Kamloops Wawa CJ, a perfectly 
natural-sounding phrase is "latet kopa X," literally "head of X," but this 
means "the reason for X."

There always was in CJ a different construction from Koefoed's that I've 
always thought of as compound prepositions.  These are sequences of two 
preposition-like words, such as "kikwili kopa" (literally "below from," 
meaning "below") and "ilip kopa" (literally "in-front from," meaning "in 
front of").  

I use the term "preposition-like" here because some words are as much like 
adjectives/adverbs as prepositions in most CJ varieties.  "Kikwili" 
and "ilip" are good examples, as are "sahali" ("above") and "kimta" 
("behind").  Koefoed comments on this as well.  

Impressionistically it seems to me that later CJ in the Kamloops area 
acquired some very (Koefoed-style) compound preposition-like 
phrases.  "Kopa insaid kopa X" (literally "on inside in X," meaning "inside 
X"), "kopa rait hand kopa X" (literally "on right hand from X," meaning "to 
the right of X"), etc.  Of course many of these are most likely signs of 
heavy English-language influence there.

An important thing to have in mind is that "kopa" was, at least in early 
Jargon, the only true preposition.  (Koefoed notes this too.)  So its 
meanings would've been extremely fluid.  I like to make the comparison with 
what semantics/logic people call "lambda abstraction".  (I did this same 
thing for Thompson Salish resonant glottalization in a very imperfect paper 
a while back.)  The rough idea is that using such a fuzzily defined 
morpheme/word signals that you've got to select a contexually appropriate 
(metaphorical?) extension of the phrase's literal meaning.  This is how you 
know to choose the right interpretations of "kopa" into English in the 
examples above: Sometimes it's obvious that "from" is more appropriate in a 
given context, in other contexts this Jargon word clearly means "than," and 
in others "on".  Etc. etc.

Any thoughts?  Prepositions are a pretty unexplored part of Jargon 
grammar...

--Dave R

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