More case alignment.

Koontz John E John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU
Tue Feb 16 05:01:49 UTC 1999


On Mon, 15 Feb 1999, Robert L. Rankin wrote:
> Note that (as far as I can tell) most verbs that are semantically active
> but morphologically stative can, virtually by definition, be analyzed as
> active, 3rd person impersonals with a zero actor prefix.  The stative
> pronominal sets that we're interpreting as stative subjects would then
> just be object prns.  So what we're translating as 'I ache' could be
> interpreted as 'it hurts me'.  'I sweat', which is stative in Quapaw,
> could be read as 'It lathers me up' or the like.  That's why 14 karat
> intransitives like 'fall' are important and we need to know if they
> incorporate etymological causatives or the like.

One possibility that occurs to me in connection with Bob's investigations
is that maybe Siouan statives arise from something like the pattern above,
combined with a use of stative pronominals with what were once invariant
adjectival stems.  This might account for the scarcity of stative
formations with semantically stative verb meanings.  I gather that Siouan
is a little off-beat in this respect.  



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