Silly terminological question.

Rankin, Robert L rankin at ku.edu
Tue Dec 4 21:03:40 UTC 2001


This is a minor but annoying problem I keep encountering when trying to do
interlinear glosses in Siouan linguistics papers.

We regularly deal with two different types of verb prefixes that we often
call "instrumental".  One is generic, the prefix /i/ or /i:/, often
translated 'with', 'by means of' but sometimes with its meaning pretty much
bleached out.

Then there are the more specific "instrumentals" like pa-, yu-, ka-, na-,
ya-, etc., etc., the familiar 'by hand', 'by mouth', 'by striking', etc.

In interlinear translations I mark these latter as INSTR.  But then what do
I do with the former type?  It distributes like the locatives, but it isn't
a locative.  Sometimes I've called the "instrumentive", which sounds silly
and is confusing to boot.  I'm just revising a paper in which I have to
solve this problem.  Anyone have an opinion??

Bob



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