Reduplicated 'say'

Koontz John E John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU
Sat Mar 27 21:46:27 UTC 1999


Here's a tidbit that might interest anyone looking at reduplication.  

This week Bob Rankin pointed out to me that Buechel's dictionary lists a
Teton stem hey'aya (Buechel 1983:174a) 'to say much, to keep saying'. 
This a reduplication of heya' 'to say that or this' (same page).  The
inflectional pattern is hepha'pha, heha'ha, heya'ya, uNke'yaya=pi. More
simply (1983:146a), there is eya'ya 'to say often, to repeat' inflected
epha'pha, eha'ha, eya'ya, uNke'yayapi.  (Note that e with eya'ya (and
e'ya) functions as a locative, and takes uNk before it.)  There are
related forms eya'yalaka and heya'yalaka 'to tell lies', which have the
same inflectional pattern, but the inclusive pattern is heuN'yaypilaka.
The third person plural is given as heya'yapilaka or heya'yalakapi. The
inclusive form suggests that Buechel may be in error with his inclusive of
heya'ya, having substituted the form for eya'ya by mistake.

What's interesting here, of course, is that the reduplicated syllable
includes the irregular inflection in the first and second person.  

I have a nonce form for this for Omaha-Ponca from Dorsey, which is
es^e's^e 'you keep saying'.  The full inflection is not attested, but
should be (?) ehe'he, es^e's^e for the first and second persons.  The
third person is a=i without reduplication, so it's not clear what it would
be if reduplicated.  The Omaha-Ponca inclusive for the paradigm is
suppletive.  The unreduplicated form is aNdhaNdha=i, from idhe.

David Rood tells me that his instinctive feeling with these forms is that
they represent reduplication before inflection.  My initial instinct was
the reverse, but now I'm inclined to go with David's assessment, frankly. 
Either way it's interesting that the inflection gets repeated in the first
and second persons.  The failure to repeat in the inclusive person is
consistant with the behavior of serial verbs of this sort. 



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