Enjoyment Verbs

Koontz John E John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU
Mon Apr 12 05:48:46 UTC 1999


I think Bob pointed out, maybe only to me, that Caroline Quintero's Osage
Grammar (UMI 9737573) has a section on doubly stative verbs (p. 158).
This mentions the verbs i'_braN 'to have/get enough; be sated with',
_o'xta 'to cherish'.  The relevant examples are wawe'braN=pe 'we're tired
of them', with two wa- prefixes (one 'them' and one 'us'), and aN'dhioxta
'you love me'.  With the latter, interestingly, the 'I-you' form uses the
transitive portmanteau wi, cf. wi'oxta 'I love you'.

However, I've noticed this evening that she also has a section on Verbs of
Enjoyment' (p. 268), listing kidhaliN 'to like, love to do something',
kihoN'oN 'to really love to do something, to be pleased', and ki'zo 'to
have fun doing something'.  These are inflected as experiencer verbs, in
that the (dative) patient is the one that enjoys, while the thing enjoyed
appears as a noun.  Caroline specifies that this noun cannot take the
animate subject articles akxa and apa and considers that it cannot
therefore be a subject.  Her example

z^ani'e dhaache' aN'dhaliN
candy   to eat   I enjoy it
I enjoy eating candy

is very similar to Omaha

niN'niN giu'daN=      att(a)s^aN
tobacco she enjoys it very
She likes smoking too much, she enjoys smoking too much



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