Voice and Bybeean Relevance

[jess tauber]

Yahgan voice prefixes include a form which has a circumstantial meaning. In the Bridges dictionary of the language there are examples where two of these circumstantials occur in sequence, with or without intervening causative, permissive, etc.

Based on the definitions provided in the text it would appear that there is a semantic differentiation when this sequencing occurs. The leftmost instance seems to encode spatiotemporal notions, while the second (I've not yet found three in a row) encodes more mass/energy specifying ones (instruments, materials needed to accomplish a task, etc.).

Am I right in assuming that there is a cline here from more peripheral/distal/external circumstantial encoding further from the root and more central/proximal/internal closer? And that this fits expectations from work by Joan Bybee and others re her 'relevance' theory? Scope?

Yahgan has many typological features of a right headed language, and the prefixed strings of voice marking morphemes appear to consistently be read from right to left. Does this also jibe with the above?

Curiously, TAM suffixes would be mirror image since more grammaticalized senses are also further from the root, fitting with the relevance ideal. Further, I've noted that many grammaticalized morphemes have an opposition of meaning depending on whether they appear prefixally or suffixally. Since Yahgan is a serializing language this makes sense from a before/after POV.

The language also has a relatively unproductive reversative morpheme. Based on the few examples I have so far, this morpheme, when incorporated into a grammaticalized form, allows it to be utilized without the usual positional reversal of meaning (a kind of double reversal,  one positional/syntactic, the other morphological). This would be interesting enough by itself, but there exist a small number of lexemes that may in fact have been created out of the grammaticalized forms (such as ta:gu: 'give', where the grammaticalized form doubling as a causative is -tu:-, and the reversative is -a:k-). I'd been under the impression that -tu:- was itself originally ta:gu:, but now I'm not so sure, and it may be that gram strings have lexicalized here.

How common is this sort of thing? How many languages do you know of that have such a reversative?

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net