Andative: conclusion

Wallace Chafe chafe at linguistics.ucsb.edu
Wed Jun 5 16:58:57 UTC 2002


All this makes me feel a little better about andative, which is definitely
accented on the first syllable. I did remember it as having been used with
respect to Miwok, and it's good to be reminded of Sylvia Broadbent.

I wonder if there's been a confusion of venitive (see Marianne's message)
with vertitive. I remember quite clearly having discussions about the
latter term with Terry Kaufman in Berkeley during the 1960s. We were both
bothered by the fact that linguists sometimes used the term inchoative for
the become meaning, as in it's getting cold etc. Inchoative seemed more
appropriate for what's otherwise called the inceptive. It may well have
been Terry who came up with vertitive as more appropriate for the become
meaning, and it then received some currency in Berkeley at the time. In
spite of that, Iroquoianists still consistently use inchoative for that
meaning. Just an added bit of terminological history.
Wally

> Anyway, we can clearly make use of andative and ventitive in describing
> some of the patterns of motion verb compounds in Mississippi Valley
> Siouan.
>
> I think Allan Taylor is on record somewhere as saying that he thought that
> the term vertitive might be more properly versive in terms of Latin
> derivational morphology.  Not that we need to "fix" it, but clearly
> there's precedent for neologistic Latinisms.
>
> Incidentally, the term vertitive was coined by Terry Kaufman and first
> taken up by Bob Hollow in his 1965 Mandan dictionary, and then by Taylor
> for Dakotan and other motion verbs (Taylor 1876:288).  This may be where
> the comment on versive occurs, but I'm not sure.



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