ihcequi doing it=?windows-1252?Q?=92s_?=applicative thing

Jonathan Amith jdanahuatl at gmail.com
Wed Nov 2 13:50:24 UTC 2011


Hi Mitsuya (is that correct),



What is your area of study. I'm sort of disconnected. In central Guerrero
there is a lot of relexification but the morphosyntax is not as affected.
In the Sierra Norte de Puebla there is a type of language ideology of
purity that leads to all sorts of calques and invented terms. Thus from
Spanish "me sale" (it turns out for me, as in "no me sale", it doesn't give
me results) SNP has ne:chki:sa ! Likewise yowi is "transitivized" as
ne:chyahki "me fue" as in "me fue bien") and tikwi is reflexively marked
though an intransitive motikwi a calque from Spanish "se prende". These are
all quite old. In Guerrero young kids start to say "nimoto:ka:"  verbal
morphology on the noun stem to:ka:- for 'me llamo'. In SNP they say
nimono:tsa.



Likewise tla-/ta- is being used differently. Young kids in Oapan say
tlakiawi (maybe a little different than kiawi indicating a place that has a
lot of rain rather than the event itself) and tlamomowi  'to be scared (in
a place). In SNP one finds mono:tsa 'it is called (person, object) and
motano:tsa 'it is called (a place such as a village)'.



Reflexively marked bodily function verbs in SNP that beging with ihC retain
or lose the /o/ of the reflexive depending on the nature of the event



ihso:ta   (never expressed without an object)

mihso:ta   'to throw up'

moihso:ta  'to throw up on oneself'

kihso:ta     'to throw up [e.g., blood]

kihso:ta    'to throw up on [e.g., a person]



Verbs that are V1/V2 with no morphological change show a lot of different
types of relations



ahsi (V1) vs. ahsi (V2) are quite different 'to arrive (there) [vs. ehko]
and 'to catch' (an object thrown, a prisoner fleeing)



posteki (V1) vs. posteki (V2) 'to break' (sth long and brittle, like a rod
or tree branch) can be a real intransitive with a patientive S of V1 but no
implied agentivity, i.e., sth can just break with no volitional agentivity.
This is what Dixon in his book on valency change refers to as
ambitransitive.



Balsas:

to:ka (V1)  vs. -to:ka  (V2)  the 'intransitive 'to:ka' has a culturally
specified meaning of 'to plant maize' and in Balsas can never take tla-
(but can take te:- with the sense of 'to bury'). In SNP one has tato:ka
with the meaning of 'to plant maize'.  In Balsas then, absence of tla- is
culturally specific. Tuggy has talked about tla- as culturally specified
object (e.g., in Balsas o:tlapilo:to is understood outside of any defining
context as 'he went to fish (hanging lines from stakes in the river) and
there is some literature on the culturally specific meaning of these types
of "antipassives" Thus English 'I am eating' has a culturally specified
meaning of "a meal"



ihseki (V1) vs. ihseki  (V2) this is more the case, as you note, of an
implied agent. In Nahuatl agents of passives can never be expressed
obliquely (whereas objects of antipassives can be! at least in Balsas, with
ika). So I am not sure whether one is best to characterize this an an
anticausative or an agentless passive. Any thoughts?  It is different from
the case in posteki as ihseki can never occur without human intervention.
In a way it is like SNP chi:wi though without the morphological derivation.



Amberber in the book by Dixon and Aikhenvald notes, p. 315: "If an event
encoded by a transitive predicate can be conceptualized as taking place
without the intervention of an external causer, the event can be cast in
the anticausative"  Since ihseki cannot occur in this manner, then perhaps
your use of anticausative is different than that implied by Amberber (and
Levin and Rappaport, whom he cites).



Cf. notsakwa in Balsas. It can be passive or anticausative

niman notsakwas ka:mpa o:timotek 'the place/cut where you cut yourself will
heal (close up) rapidly'   No agent

ma notsakwa  'let it be closed' (a door, e.g, a group of people is leaving
and I say ma notsakwa as a suggestion about the door or window but without
an overtly expressed agent)

On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 10:19 AM, SASAKI Mitsuya <
hawatari21centuries at gmail.com> wrote:

> John,
>
> Es increíble qué rápido encuentras los buenos ejemplos.
> Entonces, quizás podemos decir que ihcequi tenía dos estructuras
> argumentales distintas. No sabía que este tema era tan interesante.
>
>
> Mitsuya SASAKI
> The Department of Linguistics, the University of Tokyo
> ll116003 at mail.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.**jp <ll116003 at mail.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp>
>
> (2011/11/01 22:38), John Sullivan wrote:
>
>> Piyali Mitsuya,
>>        Efectivamente, ihcequi tiene una forma tanto intransitiva [ihcequi
>> (ihcequi).  it toasts, it roasts.<ihcequi>. b.11 f.14 p.142|)]  como
>> transitiva [ihcequi , qu- (qu-ihcequi).  they roast it; they toast it.<p33-
>> ihcequi>. b.2 f.7 p.127|].
>>        Y sí, ¡qué chido!
>> John
>>
>> On Nov 1, 2011, at 7:55 AM, SASAKI Mitsuya wrote:
>>
>>  John,
>>>
>>> Thanks for the comment and the data.
>>> Now the only remaining problem with this construal is that we have to
>>> assume two "ihcequi"'s, intransitive and transitive, like "ahci(vt/vi)".
>>> Que chida academia!
>>>
>>> Mitsuya SASAKI
>>> The Department of Linguistics, the University of Tokyo
>>> ll116003 at mail.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.**jp <ll116003 at mail.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp>
>>>
>>> (2011/11/01 11:50), John Sullivan wrote:
>>>
>>>> Ok Mitsuya and demás listeros,
>>>>        Half of the temporarily constituted and soon to be dissolved
>>>> Nahuatl morphology academy here at Notre Dame thinks that perhaps:
>>>> 1. te-, “non-specific human object” + ihcequi (intransitive), “corn
>>>> toasts or is toasted” + -ia (applicative) + -ya (imperfect tense suffix) =
>>>> teihcequiaya, “corn was toasted for people”
>>>> 2. qui, “3rd person singular specific object” + ihcequi (transitive),
>>>> “to toast something” + ya, (imperfect tense suffix) = quihcequiya, “she was
>>>> toasting it”
>>>> and the other half is reluctant to make a commitment to a firm decision
>>>> on the matter.
>>>> John
>>>> ______________________________**_________________
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>>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
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