augmentative/diminutive shifting

[SHEA KATHLEEN DORETTE]

In working on Ponca, I found a couple of examples that might be
interesting.  One of the speakers I work with tells me that the
(Omaha-)Ponca word for 'blue' is ttu, while the word for 'green' is ccu
(with c standing for an alveo-palatal voiceless affricate that patterns
with the stops p, t, and k, as does j with b, d, and g in Ponca).  Since
Siouan languages typically have one word for blue and green, ccu seems to
be an innovation.

Another example that I came across recently when I was talking to a native
Ponca speaker at the Ponca Powwow recently is what I'll term a kind of
"baby talk," or what an older person might use with a younger person I was
told:  dhaecHewadhe' 'You poor thing!' (with dh representing a voiced
dental resonant, H aspiration--a raised h, and ' an accent on the
preceding vowel). The ordinary form of this word would be dhaetHewadhe'.
The speaker said his grandfather would use the form with cH substituted
for tH when speaking to him.  I thought I had another example but am not
sure of it.  I checked with my main consultant, and he confirmed the
occasional usage of a special kind of speech by older people with younger.
This is probably the same type of speech that John refers to as "little
old lady speech," but I need to get more examples.

By the way, John Nichols gave an interesting paper at the last WAIL
conference about the dilemmas of having to compile a dictionary when there
are two competing types of speech in the community--one in use among
"younger" (about 20 to 60 years old) speakers and the other among elders.
This was in Ojibway, and I think most of the examples involved
palatalization in the younger peoples' speech with a consequent
re-ordering of phonological rules.  (I don't have a copy of his handout
with me.)  Anyway this is an interesting topic, and I agree with John
Koontz that it deserves more study.

Kathy Shea

On Tue, 7 Sep 1999, Koontz John E wrote:

> On Mon, 6 Sep 1999 Zylogy at aol.com wrote:
> > Is there someone out there who has any idea when various sound-symbolic
> > shifts in Siouan languages became unproductive- that is, lexicalized-  in
> > most of the languages?
>
> It's an interesting question whether unproductive and lexicalized are the
> same thing - at least in this case.  The fricative gradation that occurs
> throughout the family and the affrication that occurs in at least Dhegiha
> are not in any sense morphological or obligatory, and in Dhegiha the
> closest to frequent use I've seen is a text or part of a text in which
> there was a lot of the affrication.  I don't recall the details at the
> moment but I remember it seemed to be associated with a "little old lady"
> (wa?u zhiNga) speaking.
>
> On the other hand, it's not at all clear that all examples of the
> fricative gradation are inherited, so somebody, somewhere, sometime is
> manufacturing new examples that catch on and become fixed idioms.  It's a
> form of lexical affixation (nonlinear or superfix or whatever).  It seems
> to be less used (less productive) than instrumental prefixation, for
> example, but I'm not convinced it's completely unproductive in Dhegiha.  I
> just don't have any idea how productive it is.  Other lexical processes of
> uncertain degree of productivity would include reduplication and
> spontaneously generated onomatopes or ideophones.  I'm pretty sure that
> things like the locatives, reflexives, datives and suus prefixes are more
> productive, but I don't have anything but an impression to go on there
> either.  These are quasi grammatical, of course, in Siouan languages,
> though less so than personal inflection.
>
> Some of the fault for not being sure of the degree of productivity here
> falls on the shoulders of the students of Dhegiha.  We haven't been very
> productive either, I guess.  On the other hand, I suspect that it's not
> really possible to say much on this score for any language in the family,
> including the Dakotan dialects or Crow.  The truth is, very little has
> been done on such questions, and the best lexicons for Siouan languages
> are still at a quite primitive state of development, including those for
> Dakotan.  I can remember David Rood agonizing over issues like this when
> the new Lakota dictionary project got under way.  (It's currently on
> hold.)
>
> By the way, another related phenomena might be bl ~ gm alternations in
> Dakotan.  There's no real etymolopgical source for gm.
>
> > Also, family-level cross-linguistic work seems to
> > indicate that most of such augmentive/diminutive shifts originate as bound
> > morphology.
>
> Like Dakotan =la DIMINUTIVE - here in Teton form.  I think this is derived
> from =la(ka) the conjugated enclitic that means 'consider as'.  Most of
> the rest of Mississippi Valley seems to rely on appending their equivalent
> of 'be little' to the noun.  I think this occurs some in Dakotan, too.
>
> > Has any study been done to determine etymological sources within
> > Siouan?
>
> I'm not aware of any investigations into the origin of fricative gradation
> (or any of the other phenomena mentioned) in Siouan.  I've always assumed,
> however, that it originated in precisely the form in which it now exists.
> If there is something affixal underlying all this, then it's very old and
> I suspect there's nothing left of it.
>
> Howver, Wes Jones has discussed (in a SACC/MALC paper, published in the
> MALC proceedings) an apparent pattern in Proto-Siouan of forming new roots
> from old by means of various extensions (initial or final).  There are
> enough examples to make it seem that something was going on, but the basis
> of the system is completely obscure - i.e., the extensions seem arbitrary
> - at this point.
>
>