From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 1 00:09:25 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 18:09:25 -0600 Subject: Fw: Error Condition Re: Re: transitivity, etc, In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, Shannon West wrote: > > Whatever principles or diagnostics enable you to select as subject the > > agent if present, and the patient if not, will probably support the > > experiencer as subject, too. > > Thanks John. I haven't needed to use semantic roles for the most part, and > likely won't be (gotta work within theory restrictions, and for now that's > Minimalism). So, if I may ask, how does one Minimally determine what the subject is for "ordinary clauses" without double statives? Is it a question of instinct/ definition, or, as Bob puts it, translating into English and noting what the subject is there? I don't ask [just] to be difficult. I'm actually curious how this is done. When I used the phrase "whatever principles of diagnostics" I actually had this in mind as a possibility. My feeling is that *whatever* scheme one uses to identify subject, the experiencer of experiencer verbs will turn out to be the subject. In short, if you're allowed to gloss this over for "ordinary clauses,", your advisors are going to be perfectly satisfied with glossing it over for experiencer clauses. Or, if not, then whatever scheme you use is probably going to come up subject for experiencers, too. In any event, even if subjects are effectively givens of a theory there should be extratheoretical heuristics to identify them, as Keenan made his reputation by observing. To air my own dirty linen, the way I do it in Omaha-Ponca is that, by way of a shorthand for Bob's translational scheme, I define subject as the agent of transitive and active verbs, and the patient of stative verbs. In doing so I have neglected the experiencer verbs, of course, or, rather, I have swept them up with the statives, making that term also cover two argument verbs that can only have one patient marker, and taking that argument that can be so-marked as the subject. These cases turn out to be what we've been calling experiencer or sometimes, somewhat innacurately, dative-subject verbs. I haven't addressed two-patient verbs, because I haven't elicited or discovered any. In support of this arbitrary definitional approach, I can point out that the class of arguments so defined is the same class that takes the proximate subject articles akha and ama and (as recently illustrated) governs agent concord in various auxiliaries, and miNkhe/niNkhe/akha/ama concord in certain others. Of course, there are those awkward cases of "non-subject" or "obviative subject" articles, in which articles more typically used with objects appear with subjects, and there are also some oblique uses of akha/ama, too, but in Dhegiha circles these are both reasily accepted as special cases, so, I have a heuristic approach or two, as well. Unfortunately, the article heuristic won't work for Dakota (or anything but Dhegiha), though the auxiliary-concord one might. These heuristics apply within clauses. I don't at present have any heristics arising from behavior across clauses (argument identifications, extractability, etc.), though I suspect such arguments exist and would be useful in Dakota, too. I suppose I get away with this because I've largely ignored syntax to date! JEK From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 1 01:03:46 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 19:03:46 -0600 Subject: ordering of person markers In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, Shannon West wrote: > I know that this is the diachronic explanation, but that doesn't offer a > synchronic explanation. The speakers of the language don't know the > historical background, and can't use that to figure out which positions > these affixes appear. I'm wondering why they can't use the learned output of the historical process to decide what order things go in? Eric Hamp is said to be exceptional in this regard, but I'm pretty sure most of us just learn how it works from the way it is in our own lifetimes. Including literary exposure to earlier models, of course. The models are somewhat fuzzy, of course, because we are exposed to a population of varying examples, not one uniform model. I know for a fact that my modifier order parameter tends to flicker among several states. > Your diachronic explanation would have to be fitted with a templatic > account. I don't so much mind templates, but they're not exactly > popular right now, if you know what I mean. Templates don't work very well with Siouan languages, I think. Omaha-Ponca may be a bit fuller of nasty subcases and exceptions than Dakota, but it isn't too different in general nature. I think it's more a a situation with a set of morphosyntactic rules for adding given affixes, some of which conflict. In a general sort of way the derivational rules go before the pronominalization rules, but I know of a horrendous class of exceptions involving datives in Omaha-Ponca. (I mentioned this in passing this weekend.) The data in Dakota are substantially simpler, but my recollection is that comparable cases occur there. There are at least cases of ki merging with multiple pronouns, if not with pronouns a slot or two away from it. > Right now, the general feeling is that there should be rules that the > learner can use to figure out where things go rather than templates to > learn. Templates are certainly a kind of rule, but maybe you mean rules of a more fashionable sort? Or are we using template in different ways? I'm thinking in terms of templates as lists of position classes: knee-bones go before thigh bones go before pelvises, etc. The problem with this approach in Omaha-Ponca is that while first and second person pronouns generally go after outer instrumentals and similarly located "preverbs" they also go before reflexive/reciprocals and reflexive-possessives, and these are perfectly capable of being placed in front of preverbs, with the result that you get PRO(1,2) > REFL > PREVERB instead of PREVERB > PRO(1, 2), even though combining rules like PREVERB > PRO(1,2) and PRO(1,2) > REFL might lead you to expect PREVERB > PRO(1.2) > REFL. Of course, you actually get both orders, depending on the stem. Another kind of problem: all pronouns of the form V (reg A1, reg P1, A12) pop out of position and plop down in from of an initial wa, if they aren't too deeply buried in the stem, e.g., a-wa-naN?aN, but wa-z^u=a-he (? from memory). (And wa-dha-naN?aN and wa-b-dhathe.) There's certainly a general, rule-based principle involved, but it's a mix of phonology and morphosyntax and has no (direct) cross-linguistic generality. Yet another kind of problem: aN A12 goes before the locatives a and u (*o) and after i, while wa P3p goes before a and i, but after u (not counting fossilized u'- < *wa-o). And wa- ~ wa...a- P12 goes before a and u and around i (and becomes a-wa- with the causative). This mostly makes historical sense - not all of it - and doesn't seem to depend on any general principle at all, except possibly that the perversity of OP morphology tends to a maximum. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 1 01:25:19 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 19:25:19 -0600 Subject: ordering of person markers In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, ROOD DAVID S wrote: > See Bob's Soapbox Address. The synchronic explanation IS the diachronic > one -- that's the order that speakers learn and use. Templates may not be > popular, but they are what people do!! I'm convinced that these things > are memorized as chunks (wichun 'we-them', chi 'I-you"), etc., even in > English, where 'you and I' is learned as a unit and I is no longer > declinable ("for you and I" is used by speakers who would never say "for I"). In this sense templates cover the rules I was thinking of, too, and I agree that they help explain cases like 'for you and I' or embedding between verbs and satelite particles, etc. One difficulty with trying to reduce Dakotan pronominal ordering to a general principle, even ignoring two-patient verbs, and abstracting the far more critical and determining issue of where particular pronominals go, is that the existance of chunks like c^hi defeats even the possibility of meaningful generalizations. How can we call first > second a general principle if it's supported by maNya and c^hi or maNya and uN(k)(...)ya. One can only call c^hi a case of 1 > 2 on diachronic grounds entirely inobvious within Dakota. And uN(k) and maN are a fairly dubious semantic class, and certainly not a morphosyntactic one. Really there isn't enough data to make any generalizations. Another lovely OP example: the I > you form for dh-stems (y-stems in Dakota) is wi-b-, as in wi-b-dhithe 'I touched you' (sorry - an example considered obscene, but the best I could come up with from memory). I suppose wi-b-dhaxube 'I spoke of you as mysterious' might work, though it's also a bit unusual. Historically this is something like *w-(y)i-w-r... with a repeated first person. But repeated pronominals (and multiple ones, on old and current serial verbs, and on verbs and enclitic auxiliaries) are common in Siouan morphologies. JEK From rankin at ku.edu Tue Oct 1 01:55:14 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 20:55:14 -0500 Subject: synchronic and diachronic "explanation". Message-ID: > I know that this is the diachronic explanation, but that doesn't offer a > synchronic explanation. The speakers of the language don't know the > historical background, and can't use that to figure out which positions > these affixes appear. This canard gets a lot of repetition from theoreticians and is routinely used as an excuse not to study history. The fact is that your average 3 year old doesn't need to know the history of his language in order to place morphemes/words in the order of their historical addition/development. All the child has to do is LEAVE THE SYNTAX ALONE and just keep it the way s/he heard it from his or her peers/family. Take the case of Chinese "ba" for example. The kid doesn't know 'ba' used to be a real, active verb. He just leaves it where it was, and that turns out to be the historical order. Or take the Siouan 1st dual/plural and Dakotan 3rd pl. animate pronominal prefixes as another example. Both certainly appear to be old incorporated nouns meaning 'man, person' in the various languages. The kid doesn't know they used to be nouns. He just leaves 'em alone in the position that incorporanda go (or went) in the verb complex at the time they were grammaticalized. And, presto, the pronouns in Siouan occur in very peculiar orders. The whole thing isn't because the child did or did not know the history of the language: it's because he left his morphotactics alone and DIDN'T apply any "universal principles". What's left is the historical ordering. The whole claim about history being irrelevant because people don't have direct access to diachrony is a red herring. You can't divorce history from synchrony. As for templates, that paper the 4 of us wrote for Bob Dixon and Sacha Aikhenvald's volume on the "Word" as a linguistic concept discusses the problem of templates in Siouan at length, showing that they don't (and can't) work very well for principled reasons -- mostly historical of course, Bob > Your diachronic explanation would have to be fitted > with a templatic account. I don't so much mind templates, but they're not > exactly popular right now, if you know what I mean. Right now, the general > feeling is that there should be rules that the learner can use to figure out > where things go rather than templates to learn. > > The SOV order isn't fixed for the double statives in my data, but I do need > to check this out again. > > Shannon > From CaRudin1 at wsc.edu Tue Oct 1 14:09:07 2002 From: CaRudin1 at wsc.edu (Catherine Rudin/HU/AC/WSC) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 09:09:07 -0500 Subject: synchronic and diachronic "explanation". Message-ID: At the risk of making myself unpopular on the list, I'd like to stick up for the idea that synchrony is NOT always just frozen diachrony. People do certainly memorize fossilized sequences, and many things can certainly be explained that way, but speakers do also sometimes reanalyze, reorder, create novel combinations... I don't have the time or the concentration this morning to provide good examples (I've been lurking through this whole conversation mostly for time-and-concentration reasons) -- some of John's examples of ordering exceptions in Omaha might do, and there are interesting cases in Romance and Slavic clitic orders etc. if only I could remember how they go... Anyhow -- while it may well be true that affix sequences in Siouan are memorized chunks, historical fossils that children learn by rote, ridiculing the idea of even looking for possible synchronic analyses strikes me as much too harsh. As Shannon says, speakers don't know the history (and no, I don't consider this a canard) -- they do learn many things that are the result of history, but unless all orders of all possible morpheme combinations are memorized, making all new word formation impossible, there MUST be synchronic, psychologically "real" morphological rules as well. Catherine From rood at spot.Colorado.EDU Tue Oct 1 15:47:03 2002 From: rood at spot.Colorado.EDU (ROOD DAVID S) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 09:47:03 -0600 Subject: synchronic and diachronic "explanation". In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Catherine has raised a voice of reason, of course -- languages do change, and when they change it's often in predictable directions. But to insist that the ONLY thing children learning a language can use for tools is universal grammar is an extreme position that does not take very much effort to refute. People are very good at learning lists for both irregular paradigms and grammatical constructions. And I would argue that naive speakers of a language DO know the history of their language in the same sense that they "know" the grammar rules that apply to their language: because they have learned patterns and can generalize from them, they BEHAVE AS IF they had that knowledge, even when they can't articulate it. English speakers know about umlauted plurals and demonstrate that knowledge every time they say "geese" or "feet". I have just shown my undergraduates once again that they know about verb raising to I in English for the copula because they prefer "she always works hard" but "she is always on time", with "always" on different sides of the conjugated verb depending on what the verb is. That's no different, to my mind, than the "knowledge" that wicha precedes uNk and uNk precedes both ya and ni. David S. Rood Dept. of Linguistics Univ. of Colorado 295 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0295 USA rood at colorado.edu On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, Catherine Rudin/HU/AC/WSC wrote: > > At the risk of making myself unpopular on the list, I'd like to stick up > for the idea that synchrony is NOT always just frozen diachrony. People do > certainly memorize fossilized sequences, and many things can certainly be > explained that way, but speakers do also sometimes reanalyze, reorder, > create novel combinations... I don't have the time or the concentration > this morning to provide good examples (I've been lurking through this whole > conversation mostly for time-and-concentration reasons) -- some of John's > examples of ordering exceptions in Omaha might do, and there are > interesting cases in Romance and Slavic clitic orders etc. if only I could > remember how they go... > > Anyhow -- while it may well be true that affix sequences in Siouan are > memorized chunks, historical fossils that children learn by rote, > ridiculing the idea of even looking for possible synchronic analyses > strikes me as much too harsh. > > As Shannon says, speakers don't know the history (and no, I don't consider > this a canard) -- they do learn many things that are the result of history, > but unless all orders of all possible morpheme combinations are memorized, > making all new word formation impossible, there MUST be synchronic, > psychologically "real" morphological rules as well. > > Catherine > > From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 1 16:01:25 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 10:01:25 -0600 Subject: synchronic and diachronic "explanation". In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, Catherine Rudin/HU/AC/WSC wrote: > At the risk of making myself unpopular on the list, I'd like to stick up > for the idea that synchrony is NOT always just frozen diachrony. I don't know that this is an unpopular stand. I think everybody agrees that syntax changes, by changes in interpretation, by addition of new constructions, and by changes in order. I think Bob's point was only that one doesn't have to know and recapitulate the history of a form to produce it. Synchrony grows out of diachrony, but history is change as well as inheritence. Or putting it another way, history is as much a general principle as any synchronic generalization. I've always suspected that universal principles are simply the aggregate effect of initial states, phonological changes of several sorts, and reanalysis. > some of John's examples of ordering exceptions in Omaha might do, and > there are interesting cases in Romance and Slavic clitic orders etc. > if only I could remember how they go... I don't know how the Romance and Slavic clitic arguments go, either, though I've heard the Romance ones cited as specific examples of diachronic forms having been reordered by reanalysis. I believe also that the "infixed" location of pronominals in both Athabascan and Caddoan reflects to some extent phonological rules, to the extent that the placement of pronominals may actually be in mid-morpheme (and certainly is in mid-stem), in a historical sense. So, while the tendency to infix the pronominals may arise from diachronic considerations such as original order, the location of infixation can be adjusted in various ways and may be determined by subsequent principles, which, in the case of Navajo, can be reduced to contemporary phonological principles. I think my authority on this is a paper by Peggy Speas. I'm not sure the Caddoan cases are reducible to synchronic rules. I heard a report of this from David Rood, but he spared me the details. In Siouan morphology or morphosyntax infixed pronominals always seem to go nicely between morphemes, but the shape of morphemes is generally close to the shape of canonical syllables (or sequences of them), and, of course, there are a number of infixing stems whose constituency isn't actually understood diachronically, so this apparent regularity may be a matter of phonological chance and our ignorance. However, one good class of examples of reanalysis in Siouan morphology would be the common occurrence of pleonastic regular pronominals placed over irregular ones, e.g., modern Omaha attaN'be, dhas^taN'be, daNba'(=i) from earlier ttaN'be, s^taN'be, daNba=i 'I/you/(s)he saw'. I believe LaFlesche gives a comparable pattern of inflection for Osage paN 'to call', showing to have been, originally, a p-stem, though Omaha baN has been regular from the date of detailed knowledge of the language. This tendency has reformulated whole paradigms in Winnebago and Ioway-Otoe, and probably explains the limpid regularity of all but two verbs in Mandan. Another good class of examples is the migration of pronominals from infixed position to initial position, e.g., while OP kku=...he is infixing, I know that some languages treat the stem *hko=phe as prefixing (I'm not sure which at the moment). Related to this is the tendency to reduce multiply inflected stems to singly inflected stems. I believe the various attested paradigms of Dakota hiyu reflect this. Another example I think I recall is that IO guNra is singly inflected, while OP gaN=dha 'to want' has both roots inflected. These tendencies aren't absolute. I can think of probable reversals. For example, I seem to recall that Dakota has converted the inner instrumental naN 'by foot' into an outer instrumental, probably on the model of the *Ra 'by heat' instrumental, which is outer. And I'm pretty sure that the pattern of double inflection with the Omaha-Ponca suus of stop stems, agippaghe, dhagis^kaghe, gikkaghe ('to make one's own') results from over generalization of the simple paradigm ppaghe, s^kaghe, gaghe on some simpler original like *agikkaghe, *dhagikkaghe, *gikkaghe, perhaps under the influence of the dative, which is eppaghe, dhes^kaghe, giaghe. I apologize for the fuzziness of some of the examples here. I'm working from memory. JEK From smcginnis at nflc.org Tue Oct 1 18:48:19 2002 From: smcginnis at nflc.org (McGinnis, Scott) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 14:48:19 -0400 Subject: Second National Conference on Heritage Languages in America Message-ID: October 18-20, 2002 SECOND NATIONAL CONFERENCE HERITAGE LANGUAGES IN AMERICA To request a pre-registration brochure (with a poster that you can display), visit: http://www.cal.org/heritage/request.asp To register and read more about the conference, visit: http://www.cal.org/heritage/conferences/2002/ Please note that although the deadline for reduced registration has passed, you can still register electronically prior to coming to the conference. This Second National Conference will seek to further the aims of the Heritage Languages Initiative, a national effort to develop the non-English language resources that exist in our communities. It will bring together heritage language community and school leaders, representatives from pre-K-12 schools and colleges and universities, world-renowned researchers, and federal and state policymakers. The goals of the Heritage Languages Initiative and this conference are to continue to make manifest the personal, economic, and social benefits to our nation of preserving and developing the languages spoken by those living in this country; to build a national dialogue on this topic; and to develop an action agenda for the next several years. From rankin at ku.edu Tue Oct 1 20:02:50 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 15:02:50 -0500 Subject: synchronic and diachronic "explanation". Message-ID: > At the risk of making myself unpopular on the list, I'd like to stick up > for the idea that synchrony is NOT always just frozen diachrony. People do > certainly memorize fossilized sequences, and many things can certainly be > explained that way, but speakers do also sometimes reanalyze, reorder, > create novel combinations... Don't worry, you won't be unpopular; in fact I was hoping/expecting you might weigh in. Let's be clear though on the fact that NO linguist claims that "synchrony is ... *always* just frozen diachrony." I think the reverse is more often true, especially among (the increasing number of) linguists who are totally unfamiliar with historical/comparative work. I guess I do have one or two more observations that bear on our discussion though. > Anyhow -- while it may well be true that affix sequences in Siouan are > memorized chunks, historical fossils that children learn by rote, > ridiculing the idea of even looking for possible synchronic analyses > strikes me as much too harsh. Ridicule might be a little strong, BUT, it seems to me that there is no reason to look for synchronic explanation of word or morpheme order that has not actually changed. And to know that, the linguist (not the speaker/learner) has to know what has changed and what hasn't. The ordering of Dakotan /wicha-/, /uNk-/, /ma- & ni-/, /wa- & ya-/ does not require synchronic "explanation" because we know it represents the order of addition to the system. If that order were to change, and, say, /uNk-/ were to suddenly join the same position class as /wa- & ya-/, THEN an explanation is called for. I think theoreticians miss a really good bet by not studying the morphosyntactic histories of their target languages, because it is precisely where the word or morpheme order has changed that they will find their BEST EVIDENCE for UG ordering principles. Whether the learner knows language history is irrelevant to the argument that the linguist and ESPECIALLY the theoretician needs to know it. If the theoretician doesn't know the history, how can s/he know what orderings represent changes and, thus, are due to internalized rules/principles/ constraints, and what orderings are due to accidents of history (and, thus do not require explanation in terms of rules/constraints)? The REordering of postposed pronominals in, say, Mongolian, obviously requires "explanation", but the (historically conservative) ordering of the Siouan pronominals (above) does not. It's a waste of time to search for "principles" where the learner just took the path of least resistence and learned the order mama's way. But ya gotta know which is which! > As Shannon says, speakers don't know the history (and no, I don't consider > this a canard) -- I guess, from my perspective, I still do, for reasons given previously and above. I find it a poor excuse for ignoring much of linguistic scholarship (and an excuse that Slavicists and Romanists like ourselves were never allowed to get away with!). I have to admit though, that historical linguists have been piss-poor ambassadors for their subject. Historical and comparative linguistics has often been taught from materials and by instructors that ignored all the synchronic and theoretical consequences of language history. I've surveyed the historical chapters of a number of popular intro textbooks, and I must say I've been very dismayed by what I've found. Many -- no, most -- such chapters are just a string of cute anecdotes about vocabulary, a boring presentation of the Pater Noster in Old and Middle English, a handful of Indo-European cognates and a couple of trivial examples of "drive:drove::dive:dove" analogy -- plus a few paragraphs of (forgive me)Labovian drivel. We should make sure that these chapters are written by real practicioners of the discipline, and not just assigned as an additional task to the poor fellow who penned the phonology chapter. But I'm preaching again . . . . :-) Bob From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 1 23:38:00 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 17:38:00 -0600 Subject: Algonquian Parellel? Muskogean Parallel? Message-ID: It occurs to me that I've heard of a class of verbs in Algonquian languages that are similar to Omaha-Ponca (et al.) 'to lack; not to have'. The characteristic of 'to lack; not to have' is that it takes two arguments, but only the person lacking the thing can be non-third person and govern concord, at least as I have encountered the verb. Thus, with made up examples: neghe=the aNdhiNge pot the I don't have neghe=the dhidhiNge pot the you don't have neghe=the dhiNga=i pot the he doesn't have But: *I don't have you. *He doesn't have you. Aside from the wrinkle that the inflectional prefixes are patient (object, stative) forms, which leads to a sort of experiencer analysis ('me lacketh' or 'I lack' rather than 'I don't have'), this reminds me of certain Algonquian transitive stems I've heard of that agree only with the subject, not the object. (I hope it was that way, and not the reverse!) Were these called pseudo-intransitives or pseudo-transitives? Or maybe half(-assed) transitives? Is there a parallel in Muskogean, too? I seem to recall reading that Chickasaw (?) had a class of experiencer verbs in addition to a more or less Siouan-ish active/stative/transitive pattern. I hope I'm not hallucinating this ... Oh, did I say that out loud? From munro at ucla.edu Wed Oct 2 00:19:40 2002 From: munro at ucla.edu (Pamela Munro) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 17:19:40 -0700 Subject: Algonquian Parellel? Muskogean Parallel? Message-ID: You're not hallucinating, John. Muskogean languages certainly have "a class of experiencer verbs", by which I assume you might mean dative subject verbs (if people will allow me that phrasing). So we have, like Siouan, a typical "active" system with (as I call them) -- class I subject intransitive verbs (similar to e.g. Lakhota wa- 'I'), primarily active; -- class II subject intransitive verbs (similar to e.g. Lakhota ma- 'I'), primarily non-active; -- class I subject, class II object transitive verbs. We also have class III "datives", which can be either objects or subjects. As objects, they can be the only object (with verbs like Chickasaw i-hollo 'love' [I am writing nasal vowels as underlined; if this does not come across in your email let me know and I can send this to you another way], which takes a I subject, III object [with the dative prefix im-]) or can be a second object added to an ordinary transitive, as with im-pilachi 'send to'. As subjects, they are typically intransitive (e.g. in-takho'bi 'be lazy'). However, we also have occasional transitive II and III subject verbs, such as banna 'want' (II subject) and im-alhkaniya 'forget' (III subject). These, like the 'lack' verbs that have been the subject of recent discussion, take a subject that may be non-third person, but must have a third person object: Ofi' sa-banna. 'I want a dog' dog 1sII-want Ofi' am-alhkaniya. 'I forget the dog' dog 1sIII.dat-forget Hattak-at ofi' banna. 'The man wants a dog' man-nom dog want Hattak-at ofi' im-alhkaniya. 'The man forgets the dog' man-nom dog dat-forget Muskogean, unlike Siouan, has nominal case marking, so we know that it is the wanter or the forgetter who is the subject, despite the verb agreement. (We could add nominative pronouns to the first two sentences for emphasis if we wanted. But usually we don't want. There are numerous other syntactic subject tests, too, all of which agree on what the subject is here.) Further: In Chickasaw only one object can agree. So 'send to' for example cannot have a non-third person patient, even though the simple transitive pilachi 'send' can. (In some languages, such as Choctaw, this is not the case, and you can get three agreeing arguments on a verb.) Moreover, some Choctaw speakers allow a non-third person patient for 'want', so you can have two II markers on the same verb. No Chickasaw speaker I've worked with allows this, though. Pam -- Pamela Munro Professor Department of Linguistics UCLA Box 951543 Los Angeles Ca 90095-1543 http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/linguistics/people/munro/munro.htm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jpboyle at midway.uchicago.edu Wed Oct 2 00:36:43 2002 From: jpboyle at midway.uchicago.edu (John Boyle) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 19:36:43 -0500 Subject: Fw: Error Condition Re: Re: transitivity, etc, In-Reply-To: <000501c26835$403efb60$6436688e@macdonald> Message-ID: > > -----Original Message----- >> From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu >> [mailto:owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu]On Behalf Of R. Rankin >> Sent: September 29, 2002 4:16 PM >> To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu >> Subject: Re: Fw: Error Condition Re: Re: transitivity, etc, >> >> >> I think all the MVS languages have this pattern with at >> least a few of those "experiencer" verbs. They're not >> just Dakotan, and you can get two stative pronominals. >> Membership in the class varies, just as stative-status >> does across Siouan. >> >> If you believe that "subject" is part of "UG", then you >> have verbs with stative subjects acting transitively on >> objects -- both marked w/ pronominals from the >> "stative" set. > >I'm wondering about this too. Given that I do have to work with a 'subject', >a work-around is going to be in order. Is there any chance that the either >the subject or object of these verbs is different in some way? A dative >perhaps? (I'm grasping at straws). Also, is there some ordering difference >with these? I have a set that is completely incomprehensible to me. > >Linda? Do you have a set of these in Nakota? Any idea at all how they work, >because they seem to be out to lunch and completely different from many of >the Lakhota ones. > >Shannon >(I am *so* hoping to deal with this as a 'I don't know how this works, it >requires further study'. ) Hi All, I don't think 'subject' is a part of UG at lease in a GB/MP framework (although it is in a LFG/RG framework). As a matter of fact, the primacy of grammatical relations (subject, object, indirect object, etc.) is denied in GB/MP. These relations are derived from other primitives. There properties emerge from various components of the grammar (structural position, case, theta-theory, etc.) There should be no rule/transformation that refers to "subject" that can't be formulated in terms of "agent" (theta-role) or "higest NP in the clause" (position) or "nominative" (case). For more on this see James McCloskey's article on subjects in Haegeman's 1999 Elements of Grammar. It is a good overview of all of the relevant arguments and decompositions. I'm not quite sure how to look at these types of double stative verbs, but we should be able to come up with something. --John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From voorhis at westman.wave.ca Wed Oct 2 13:54:57 2002 From: voorhis at westman.wave.ca (voorhis at westman.wave.ca) Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 08:54:57 -0500 Subject: Algonquian Parellel? Muskogean Parallel? Message-ID: Koontz John E wrote: > > It occurs to me that I've heard of a class of verbs in Algonquian > languages that are similar to Omaha-Ponca (et al.) 'to lack; not to have'. > The characteristic of 'to lack; not to have' is that it takes two > arguments, but only the person lacking the thing can be non-third person > and govern concord, at least as I have encountered the verb. > Aside from the wrinkle that the inflectional prefixes are patient (object, > stative) forms, which leads to a sort of experiencer analysis ('me > lacketh' or 'I lack' rather than 'I don't have'), this reminds me of > certain Algonquian transitive stems I've heard of that agree only with the > subject, not the object. There are such stems. But the absent affixed object pronouns can be expressed by independent pronouns. For example, a Kickapoo man addressing peyote said: nekiisinaacihie kiai 'I sought help from you' containing ne- 'I', naacihiee- 'seek help from' with the long ee shortened when final, k- 'your', -iai 'self' usually reflexive but also serving as a second-person inanimate pronoun -- peyote is inanimate in Kickapoo. Of course, modern Algonquian languages cannot reproduce the stative vs. active contrast of Siouan and Muskogean because they mostly use the same pronominal affixes for both subject and object, sorting out the reference with the so-called theme signs, though the latter must have been object pronouns originally. > (I hope it was that way, and not the reverse!) > Were these called pseudo-intransitives or pseudo-transitives? Or maybe > half(-assed) transitives? My take on the pseudo-intransitives is that they are just intransitive verbs that seem to contain a morpheme that usually indicates transitives, cf. Ojibwe pimipattoon 'run' and aapacittoon 'use it', both with -ttoo- (-n is just the 2nd sg. imperative suffix). Conversely, pseudo-transitive verbs lack any common transitive morpheme, cf. Ojibwe miicin 'eat it' and wiissinin 'eat'. It would be like calling Dakota nazhiN 'stand' pseudo-intransitive because na- 'by foot' is in so many transitive verbs, and calling uN 'use' pseudo-transitive because it lacks an instrumental prefix. Why don't Siouanists do this? Maybe because it's not a very useful concept? But maybe some other Algonquianist can make a better pseudo-defense. Paul From shanwest at uvic.ca Wed Oct 2 18:20:16 2002 From: shanwest at uvic.ca (Shannon West) Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 11:20:16 -0700 Subject: Fw: Error Condition Re: Re: transitivity, etc, In-Reply-To: Message-ID: RE: Fw: Error Condition Re: Re: transitivity, etc,For more on this see James McCloskey's article on subjects in Haegeman's 1999 Elements of Grammar. It is a good overview of all of the relevant arguments and decompositions. I'm not quite sure how to look at these types of double stative verbs, but we should be able to come up with something. --John Oh thanks so much! I'll look into that right away. Shannon -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Thu Oct 3 00:03:05 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 18:03:05 -0600 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? In-Reply-To: <3D9A3B9C.A400FFD7@ucla.edu> Message-ID: On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, Pamela Munro wrote: > You're not hallucinating, John. Muskogean languages certainly have "a > class of experiencer verbs", by which I assume you might mean dative > subject verbs (if people will allow me that phrasing). I've been trying to avoid that in the Siouan context because (in OP, anyway) there are two forms of experiencer subject verbs, ones that use the simple stative series of pronominals, like dhiNge 'to lack' (aNdhiNge, dhidhiNge, dhiNge), and ones that are formed on dative stems and use the dativized patient series, like git?e 'one's own to die' (iNt?e, dhit?e, git?e). > So we have, like Siouan, a typical "active" system with (as I call them) > > -- class I subject intransitive verbs (similar to e.g. Lakhota wa- 'I'), > primarily active; > -- class II subject intransitive verbs (similar to e.g. Lakhota ma- > 'I'), primarily non-active; > -- class I subject, class II object transitive verbs. > > We also have class III "datives", which can be either objects or > subjects. As objects, they can be the only object (with verbs like > Chickasaw i-hollo 'love' [I am writing nasal vowels as underlined; if > this does not come across in your email let me know and I can send > this to you another way], No trace of underlining for me. I assume this is iNhollo, then? > which takes a I subject, III object [with the dative prefix im-]) or > can be a second object added to an ordinary transitive, as with > im-pilachi 'send to'. As subjects, they are typically intransitive > (e.g. in-takho'bi 'be lazy'). Thus it seems that there are both I, II transitives and I, III transitives, as also in Mississippi Valley Siouan, where the latter are like transitive dative stems (and datives stems are usually transitive, of course). Cf. naN?aN' 'hear' (anaN'?aN 'I hear it', aNnaN'?aN 'he hears me', ...) gi'naN?aN 'hear for' (e'naN?aN 'I hear his', iN'naN?aN 'he hears mine', ...) > However, we also have occasional transitive II and III subject verbs, > such as banna 'want' (II subject) and im-alhkaniya 'forget' (III > subject). These, like the 'lack' verbs that have been the subject of > recent discussion, take a subject that may be non-third person, but must > have a third person object: ... (exx.) And git?e' is an example of a III subject verb. Of course, it's a bit of a stretch, though not an unnatural one, to speak of I vs. II vs. III in a Siouan context, since it's more like Pronouns {I, II} x Stems {non-dative, dative}, where I is agent and II patient. While it's true that "dative" involves raising a less direct object to character of concord-governing primary object, an effect on the interpretation of the II (patient) pronominal, the morphophonemic effect on the vowels of the verb having a dative marker in the mix applies to both the I and II pronouns. There are really four series of pronominals I, II, I-in-the-presence-of-dative, and II-in-the-presence-of-dative. In OP some dative forms don't even use the modified series - the effect of the dative marker can be absorbed by the locative or just not occur. > ... There are numerous other syntactic subject tests, too, [apart from > case marking of NPs] all of which agree on what the subject is here.) I wonder if any of these would apply in Assiniboine for Shannon? Is there a reference one could consult? > Further: In Chickasaw only one object can agree. So 'send to' for > example cannot have a non-third person patient, even though the simple > transitive pilachi 'send' can. (In some languages, such as Choctaw, this > is not the case, and you can get three agreeing arguments on a verb.) > Moreover, some Choctaw speakers allow a non-third person patient for > 'want', so you can have two II markers on the same verb. No Chickasaw > speaker I've worked with allows this, though. This variety of treatments of secondary objects sounds like it might be relevant in the Siouan context, too, since things seem to be different in Dakotan and Dhegiha and maybe even in Omaha-Ponca vs. Osage and Kaw. JEK From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Thu Oct 3 00:19:16 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 18:19:16 -0600 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? In-Reply-To: <3D9AFAB0.4FECC536@westman.wave.ca> Message-ID: On Wed, 2 Oct 2002 voorhis at westman.wave.ca wrote: > Of course, modern Algonquian languages cannot reproduce the stative vs. > active contrast of Siouan and Muskogean because they mostly use the same > pronominal affixes for both subject and object, sorting out the > reference with the so-called theme signs, though the latter must have > been object pronouns originally. I've seen similar analyses of the IE theme vowel in verbs, comparing thematic paradigms to the definite object paradigms in some Uralic languages. > My take on the pseudo-intransitives is that they are just intransitive > verbs that seem to contain a morpheme that usually indicates > transitives, cf. Ojibwe pimipattoon 'run' and aapacittoon 'use it', > both with -ttoo- (-n is just the 2nd sg. imperative suffix). > Conversely, pseudo-transitive verbs lack any common transitive > morpheme, cf. Ojibwe miicin 'eat it' and wiissinin 'eat'. I take it that there are actually *both* pseudo-intransitives and pseudo-transitives in Algonquain languages? Do pseudo-transitives, which seem to be the relevant class involve a non-concordial argument (or maybe the term here is complement)? Was the 'seek help from' verb (I deleted the example in editing this down) a pseudo-transitive, so-called, or that something different? Actually, I'm sort of casting about for a better term than "experiencer (subject) verb." I've already explained why "dative subject" doesn't appeal to me. I'd also like something that doesn't presume the subject issue, or, at least, address it, since that introduces a number of possibly irrelevant assumptions. There are at least four morphological classes of these verbs to handle in Siouan contexts, to wit, verbs like dhiNge that are always "like that," but aren't dative, verbs like git?e that are always like that, and are dative, verbs that stative but can also act like that, and, as I recall from previous discussions, verbs that are probably always like that and involve a locative. JEK From munro at ucla.edu Thu Oct 3 01:30:48 2002 From: munro at ucla.edu (Pamela Munro) Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 18:30:48 -0700 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? Message-ID: John K. is correct about Chickasaw 'love', where my underlinings may not have transmitted to all of you: it is iN-hollo, where iN- is a nasalized vowel (the pre-fricative allomorph of dative im-). I'm very interested indeed by these thoughts about the Siouan "III" series. I had not thought about this this way, and it's interesting. If anyone wants to see a discussion of the syntactic tests for subjecthood (for those of us who care about subjecthood....) in Chickasaw, the clearest recent description is in my paper in the Payne-Barshi External Possession volume. I'm afraid none of these are likely to work exactly as I describe for any Siouan language I'm familiar with. They include -- nominative case marking (there are wrinkles involving this, as people familiar with Muskogean will understand) -- triggering the use of the third-person plural hoo- prefix [in my experience, the use of -pi in e.g. Lakhota cannot be simply described with regard to subjects] -- triggering switch-reference [although there are switch-referency facts in Siouan I don't think the situation is as clear as in Muskogean, though I'd be delighted to be proven wrong here] -- triggering the use of the diminutive verb suffix -a/o'si [this is strictly related to featues of the subject of the suffixed verb, in contrast, in my experience, with e.g. Lakhota -la, which does not seem clearly subject-related] When I was looking at this more seriously in Lakhota, I worked hard on trying to find subject properties in terms of complementation and auxiliary usage, without full success. Good luck with this, though! Pam -- Pamela Munro Professor, Department of Linguistics, UCLA UCLA Box 951543 Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543 USA http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/linguistics/people/munro/munro.htm From napshawin at hotmail.com Thu Oct 3 13:55:32 2002 From: napshawin at hotmail.com (Violet catches) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 08:55:32 -0500 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? Message-ID: John Could someone put me in contact with a linguist who is studying Algonqian languages or to be specific, Michif spoken on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. I have a hard time getting materials from t hat language. philamayaya pi xce! Violet _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Thu Oct 3 16:22:05 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 10:22:05 -0600 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? In-Reply-To: <3D9B9DC8.DEFC46CE@ucla.edu> Message-ID: On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, Pamela Munro wrote: > I'm very interested indeed by these thoughts about the Siouan "III" > series. I had not thought about this this way, and it's interesting. The three-way contrast of pronominals presumably works for Muskogean because the marking of dative is wholely confined to the object pronominal. I seem to recall that it has something to do with the nasal, but it has been a while since I read anything relevant. If the marking can be fairly transparently factored off and the remaining pronominal element matches the II series, then maybe the III series is still somewhat notional. But I don't recall if this works. In OP, dative marking affects the wa-locative-pronominal string in idiosyncratic ways, depending on the locative (or absence thereof), but, in the absence of a locative, it affects both pronominals (agent and patient, or I and II). So, while I tended to think in terms of agent, patient, and dative pronominals initially, I ended up resolving not to, feeling that in the OP case that approach obscured matters mroe than it helped them. The situation in Dakotan is materially simpler, but complicated in a different way (from my point of view) by the apparent swapping of the dative and suus paradigms (relative to Dhegiha). Still, I think it makes more sense there, too, to think in terms of dative as separate from the pronominals, though I'd have to review matters to be sure! From munro at ucla.edu Thu Oct 3 17:41:26 2002 From: munro at ucla.edu (Pamela Munro) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 10:41:26 -0700 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? Message-ID: Hi, John and Siouanists, I hope we aren't getting to parochially Muskogean here.... It's debatable how completely segmentable the dative element is from the "III" paradigm, for two reasons (A and B below; consider also C). A. In all but first person singular, the forms are purely "II" class + dative im- (with the nasal assimilating to a following stop and coalescing with the preceding vowel before a fricative). All the II prefixes end with a vowel, but it is completely regular for an i to delete following a vowel in this environment. The problem is first person singular. The II prefix is sa-; the III + dative prefix is am- (i.e. a- + im-), not sam- (sa- + im-). Immediately this looks as though we have a different series here, which is the same in all persons but 1sg. The situation is a bit more complicated in a few languages, such as Chickasaw, which provide evidence that 1sg III am- really should be seen as underlying /sam-/ at some level: after certain preceding prefixes (I class 2sg. ish-, I class 2pl hash-, or "hypothetical" ik-) the 1sg III + dative prefix is sam-: Am-pilachi. 'He sends it to me' 1sIII.dat-send Ik-sam-pila'ch-o. 'He doesn't send it to me' hyp-1sIII.dat-send-neg Is-sam-pilachi. 'You send it to me' 2sI-1sIII.dat-send (just like 1sII sa-, 1sIII.dat sam- triggers a change of 2sI ish- to is-) So we might like to say this really was the 1sII prefix sa- and that the initial s- just drops in initial position for some reason. However, this would have to be a truly ad hoc rule: there is no other invironment in which initial s- drops. (In particular, initial s- never drops from the 1sII prefix, though see C below.) B. Another difference between the II class prefixes and the III+dative prefixes is positional/morphophonological. To me these arguments seem fairly clearly to show that the prefixes that appear with the dative cannot be synchronically the same as the II prefixes. (Some of this argumentation may appear in Charles Ulrich's dissertation on Choctaw.) i. In Chickasaw (I won't try here to review the complex facts for other languages) the III+dative prefixes precede the segmentable a- at the beginning of verbs; the II prefixes follow this a- (which below I will gloss simply as a; complex issue): Am-a-pila. 'He helps her for me' 1sIII.dat-a-help A-sa-pila. 'He helps me' a-1sII-help ii. The III+dative is phonologically a clitic, or at least is outside the domain of the rhythmic lengthening rule; the II prefix is within the domain of rhythmic lengthening. In these examples I'll put a # following lengthened vowels: Amapi#la. Asa#pila. cf. Api#la. 'He helps her' This rule (described extensively elsewhere) lengthens short nonfinal vowel in even numbered open syllables within a morphologically specified domain. C. Despite the fact that we don't see a- as a 1sg prefix except in the III+dative markers within the strict domain of agreement, there is one other environment where this appears -- fossilized vocatives of a few kinship terms, such as a-ppo'si' 'granny'. (Otherwise we'd expect II here, e.g. sa-ppo'si' 'my grandmother'.) All in all, I don't regard the "III" concept as "notional"! But not everyone would agree with me.... Pam Koontz John E wrote: > On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, Pamela Munro wrote: > > I'm very interested indeed by these thoughts about the Siouan "III" > > series. I had not thought about this this way, and it's interesting. > > The three-way contrast of pronominals presumably works for Muskogean > because the marking of dative is wholely confined to the object > pronominal. I seem to recall that it has something to do with the nasal, > but it has been a while since I read anything relevant. If the marking > can be fairly transparently factored off and the remaining pronominal > element matches the II series, then maybe the III series is still somewhat > notional. But I don't recall if this works. > > In OP, dative marking affects the wa-locative-pronominal string in > idiosyncratic ways, depending on the locative (or absence thereof), but, > in the absence of a locative, it affects both pronominals (agent and > patient, or I and II). So, while I tended to think in terms of agent, > patient, and dative pronominals initially, I ended up resolving not to, > feeling that in the OP case that approach obscured matters mroe than it > helped them. > > The situation in Dakotan is materially simpler, but complicated in a > different way (from my point of view) by the apparent swapping of the > dative and suus paradigms (relative to Dhegiha). Still, I think it makes > more sense there, too, to think in terms of dative as separate from the > pronominals, though I'd have to review matters to be sure! From munro at ucla.edu Thu Oct 3 17:59:15 2002 From: munro at ucla.edu (Pamela Munro) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 10:59:15 -0700 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? Message-ID: Oops, before anyone corrects me, of course there is another 1sg a- in Chickasaw: the 1sg "N" class prefix (which is formed with hypothetical ik-) is ak-. However, and I won't go into this here, this series definitely does not componentially include the II class prefixes in all persons. Pam From voorhis at westman.wave.ca Thu Oct 3 22:15:20 2002 From: voorhis at westman.wave.ca (voorhis at westman.wave.ca) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 17:15:20 -0500 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? Message-ID: Koontz John E wrote: > I take it that there are actually *both* pseudo-intransitives and > pseudo-transitives in Algonquain languages? Yes. > Do pseudo-transitives, which > seem to be the relevant class involve a non-concordial argument (or maybe > the term here is complement)? Yes, and that contrasts with the true transitive inanimate verbs which do have a suffix for inanimate object - that's in the view of those who believe in the pseudo-categories. You're making me defend an analysis here that I disagree with. I don't think what has been identified as the inan. obj. suffix is a morpheme at all. > Was the 'seek help from' verb (I deleted the example in editing this down) > a pseudo-transitive, so-called, or that something different? It is a pseudo-transitive, but of a subclass that admits objects of either gender. This class I do accept. > Actually, I'm sort of casting about for a better term than "experiencer > (subject) verb." I've already explained why "dative subject" doesn't > appeal to me. I'd also like something that doesn't presume the subject > issue, or, at least, address it, since that introduces a number of > possibly irrelevant assumptions. Someone has already said "double stative." > There are at least four morphological classes of these verbs to handle in > Siouan contexts, to wit, verbs like dhiNge that are always "like that," > but aren't dative, verbs like git?e that are always like that, and are > dative, verbs that stative but can also act like that, and, as I recall > from previous discussions, verbs that are probably always like that and > involve a locative. Double statives, dative double statives, optionally double statives and locative double statives? Try telling your students about *that* on the first day of linguistics class. Paul From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Oct 4 00:42:24 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 18:42:24 -0600 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? In-Reply-To: <3D9CC177.D6ADB74@westman.wave.ca> Message-ID: On Thu, 3 Oct 2002 voorhis at westman.wave.ca wrote: > > Actually, I'm sort of casting about for a better term than "experiencer > > (subject) verb." I've already explained why "dative subject" doesn't > > appeal to me. I'd also like something that doesn't presume the subject > > issue, or, at least, address it, since that introduces a number of > > possibly irrelevant assumptions. > > Someone has already said "double stative." That works for some sorts of examples in Dakotan, but doesn't seem applicable to OP dhiNge (Da niNc^a) at all. It's more like stative + nonconcordial third person. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Oct 4 00:57:02 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 18:57:02 -0600 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? In-Reply-To: <3D9C8145.7CA50DBB@ucla.edu> Message-ID: On Thu, 3 Oct 2002, Pamela Munro wrote: > I hope we aren't getting to parochially Muskogean here.... No problem for me. I think the sorts of considerations applied are potentially parallel enough to be relevant. Incidentally, there isn't a Muskogean list, is there? > C. Despite the fact that we don't see a- as a 1sg prefix except in the > III+dative markers within the strict domain of agreement, there is one other > environment where this appears -- fossilized vocatives of a few kinship > terms, such as a-ppo'si' 'granny'. (Otherwise we'd expect II here, e.g. > sa-ppo'si' 'my grandmother'.) For what it's worth, in Omaha-Ponca, and to an extent I don't recall precisely in other Dhegiha languages, a couple of kinship terms seem to have the dative version of Pat1 for the first person possessive: iNdadi 'my father' stem -dadi dhiadi 'your father' stem -adi idhadi 'his father' stem -adi dadi=ha(u) 'o father' stem -dadi Compare 'mothere's brother' with the usual possessives: winegi 'my mo bro' stem -negi dhinegi 'your mo bro' inegi 'his mo bro' negi=hau(u) 'o mo bro' 'Mother' works somewhat like 'father', including the suppletion. A possible fossil of this is iNs^?age 'elder (male)'. From jbmart at wm.edu Fri Oct 4 02:22:58 2002 From: jbmart at wm.edu (jbmart at wm.edu) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 22:22:58 -0400 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hello, everyone, Just a note to let you know another Muskogeanist is lurking. There's not a Muskogean list so far as I know, but it sounds like a fine idea. I'll listen in on this one for a while to see what it's like... Jack Martin College of William and Mary From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Oct 4 06:25:07 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 00:25:07 -0600 Subject: More on Experiencer Subjects and/or Pseudo-Transitives (?) Message-ID: Rankin's quesitonaire on case alignment from the archives of the list: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9902&L=siouan&D=0&P=73 Rankin's list of stative verbs with active meanings in Kaw from the archives of the list: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9903&L=siouan&P=70 Osage verbs of enjoyment and subjects from the archives: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9904&L=siouan&P=R2435&D=0 Forms with experiencer subjects in Omaha-Ponca in the archives of the list: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9902&L=siouan&P=R258 Omaha-Ponca comparisons with Rankin's statives with active meaning from the archives: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9903&L=siouan&P=R484 There is a set of examples of Omaha-Ponca git?e and t?e in the archives of the list at: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0005&L=siouan&P=R620. John E. Koontz http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Oct 4 06:58:06 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 00:58:06 -0600 Subject: Dakota ni(N)c^a Message-ID: I had proposed earlier to look at 'lack' verbs in other Mississippi Valley languages: Dakota (wa)niN'c^a Ingham gives 'hace, not; lack, have missing' wanic^a vn (neuter verb, i.e., stative), first person wama'nica or mawa'nica. ex. isto saNni wanica 'he had one arm missing'; ...; nuNge mawanice 'I have no ears, am disobedient, obstinate' I'm not aware that he lists a form without wa- and under 'lack, miss, be short of' he gives naokpani va and yuchaN vn. Buechel lists ni'ca 'be destitute of, have none of', first person manica. He lists wanica 'none', but gives manica as the first person. IO n(~)iNn(~)e ~ n(~)iNe 'there is/are no, none, nothing, be without' The sequence *VNke comes out VNn~e in Ioway (?) and VNr in Otoe (?). The is eng, and n is regularly n~ (enye) before i or e or iN. Wi his^jara' niNiNk 'to be blind' Lit. 'to lack eyes'. The inflection is his^jara hiNniNk 'I ...', with the first person patient hiN-. Also, nuNuNg^niN'k, nuNuNg^ra'niNk 'be deaf', lit. 'to lack earholes', cf. Dakota 'disobedient'. First person nuNuNriniNk with i(N) first person patient after a vowel: -ra + iN => i(N), (N) unnoticed before n. I believe these idioms may be the only attestations of the form in Winnebago. John E. Koontz http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz From rankin at ku.edu Fri Oct 4 14:59:04 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 09:59:04 -0500 Subject: Siouan 'not be', 'lack', 'be/have none' Message-ID: > > Someone has already said "double stative." I think that's what most Siouanists have been using -- or maybe that's just my impression because that's what I used in that Siouan Conference paper. Since I'm doing something similar for SSILA in Jan., I'm enjoying the discussion and will find it helpful in my current revision. > That works for some sorts of examples in Dakotan, but doesn't seem > applicable to OP dhiNge (Da niNc^a) at all. It's more like stative + > nonconcordial third person. A number of languages have these 'not to be', 'to be/have nothing', 'to lack', etc. verbs, but Siouan nica, ninge, etc. are especially good examples; the only way they could be better is if there were 3rd sg. pronominals. I think some of the problem lies in our translations of this verb. The translation governs whether you get an English "nominative", "accusative" or "dative" subject pronoun -- all 3 may be possible. I wish I knew how real speakers of Siouan languages "think about" this verb -- but, then, I guess it's the linguist's job to figure that out, isn't it? Bob From rood at spot.Colorado.EDU Fri Oct 4 18:44:10 2002 From: rood at spot.Colorado.EDU (ROOD DAVID S) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 12:44:10 -0600 Subject: Dakota ni(N)c^a In-Reply-To: Message-ID: John, Both ni'c^a and wani'ca exist; until you cited Ingham, I had never heard of wani'ca being conjugated -- it's always meant something like 'there isn't any' in the contexts where I've heard it. The sterotypical sentence with ni^ca is "ma'zaska mani'ce" 'I don't have any money'. At some point I remember learning that one of these was preferred for things that are normally expected to exist to be missing, such as body parts or those kin that everyone has, like mothers and fathers, while the other was used for less expected stuff like food or cars or those kin terms that not everyone has, like older or younger siblings -- but I can't find written confirmation of that even though I've just looked, and I can't be sure which is which. David S. Rood Dept. of Linguistics Univ. of Colorado 295 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0295 USA rood at colorado.edu On Fri, 4 Oct 2002, Koontz John E wrote: > I had proposed earlier to look at 'lack' verbs in other Mississippi Valley > languages: > > Dakota (wa)niN'c^a > > Ingham gives 'hace, not; lack, have missing' wanic^a vn (neuter verb, > i.e., stative), first person wama'nica or mawa'nica. ex. isto saNni wanica > 'he had one arm missing'; ...; nuNge mawanice 'I have no ears, am > disobedient, obstinate' > > I'm not aware that he lists a form without wa- and under 'lack, miss, be > short of' he gives naokpani va and yuchaN vn. > > Buechel lists ni'ca 'be destitute of, have none of', first person manica. > He lists wanica 'none', but gives manica as the first person. > > IO n(~)iNn(~)e ~ n(~)iNe 'there is/are no, none, nothing, be without' > The sequence *VNke comes out VNn~e in Ioway (?) and VNr in Otoe (?). > The is eng, and n is regularly n~ (enye) before i or e or iN. > > Wi his^jara' niNiNk 'to be blind' Lit. 'to lack eyes'. The inflection is > his^jara hiNniNk 'I ...', with the first person patient hiN-. > > Also, nuNuNg^niN'k, nuNuNg^ra'niNk 'be deaf', lit. 'to lack earholes', cf. > Dakota 'disobedient'. First person nuNuNriniNk with i(N) first person > patient after a vowel: -ra + iN => i(N), (N) unnoticed before n. > > I believe these idioms may be the only attestations of the form in > Winnebago. > > John E. Koontz > http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz > From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Oct 4 20:03:49 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 14:03:49 -0600 Subject: Dakota ni(N)c^a In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 4 Oct 2002, ROOD DAVID S wrote: > ... The sterotypical sentence with ni^ca is "ma'zaska mani'ce" 'I > don't have any money'. I'm pretty sure that maNzeska aNdhiNge would work in OP, too. > At some point I remember learning that one of these was preferred > for things that are normally expected to exist to be missing, such as body > parts or those kin that everyone has, like mothers and fathers, while the > other was used for less expected stuff like food or cars or those kin > terms that not everyone has, like older or younger siblings -- but I can't > find written confirmation of that even though I've just looked, and I > can't be sure which is which. ... but, I have the impression from my quick look last night, and from your comment, that OP use of dhiNge is much freer and less restricted lexically than use in at least Dakotan and Winnebago. JEK From rankin at ku.edu Fri Oct 4 20:35:58 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 15:35:58 -0500 Subject: Fw: a literary investigation of Lakota plant names Message-ID: I received this excerpt on Lakota ethnobotany from a KU student of Kelly Kindscher, the author of a couple of nice books on Indian use of plants for food and medicine, etc. He asked for comment. I don't know that I have a whole lot to say about it, but I told him I'd ask the list. Those of you with an interest in Lakota (or other Siouan) ethnobotany and plant terminology may be interested in reading the attachment and/or contacting Bob Prue. Bob Rankin ----- Original Message ----- From: Bob Eagleman Prue To: Cc: Kelly Kindscher Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 9:11 AM Subject: a literary investigation of Lakota plant names > Dr. Rankin, Kelly Kindscher suggested that I send a couple pages of a > couple of pages of a paper I did for him over the summer for your feedback > and comment. I would appreciate it if you have the time > > thanks > > Bob Prue > > > > >X-Originating-IP: [129.237.35.95] > >From: "Kindscher, Kelly" > >To: "'Bob Eagleman Prue'" > >Subject: your paper > >Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2002 15:33:16 -0500 > >X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2653.19) > > > >Bob, > > I just finished giving your paper a closer look. I really like it. I did > >not edit it, but thought about how to make it stronger. I would consider > >shortening it, before submitting it for publication. I would consider > >reducing the part about where plant medicines come from as others have > >discussed that and you are not adding a lot of new material. > > I also think you should consider discussing the latter part about the > >Lakota plant names with someone in the Linguistics Dept., so that they could > >give you some feedback on your ideas. I would contact Bob Rankin (tell him > >I sent you) and ask if he could help or who he would suggest. I would him > >the paper, but tell him you just want him to read pages 13-14 so that you > >could get some feedback. > > After that, I would encourage you to have one other person read it who has > >some knowledge on the topic, and then one person to copy edit it, then send > >it out for publication. > >Kelly > >P.S. See you tomorrow. > > There are many ways to contact me: > sicangu at swbell.net > bobprue at ku.edu > 816-531-3655 > 3642 Charlotte St. > Kansas City, MO 64109 > > http://home.swbell.net/sicangu > > ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------- > -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: A LITERARY INVESTIGATION OF LAKOTA PLANT NAMES.doc Type: application/msword Size: 28160 bytes Desc: not available URL: From rankin at ku.edu Sat Oct 5 21:26:47 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 16:26:47 -0500 Subject: More on "Experiencer Subjects" Message-ID: I am probably responsible for some of the confusion in recent correspondence on this topic. I have not been careful with my wording, I'm afraid, and have used the term "experiencer subject". I should probably simply omitted the reference to "subject". I feel we are dealing with semantic roles (semantic case, 'deep' case, theta roles, whatever), of which "experiencer" is certainly one, and I should not have coupled it with "subject", which is a grammatical relation, not a semantic role. If this has created misunderstandings, I'm sorry. Obviously these matters are going to have to be dealt with by any linguist working with a typical Siouan language, but different models of grammar treat them differently. Those of you in the throes of thesis-writing have mentioned having to stick to particular orthodoxies. Let me play devil's advocate and point out that the dissertations that have had the greatest impact have not been the ones that simply treated a language within a particular model. Rather they have been the dissertations that used data from particular languages to CHALLENGE the model(s). George Lakoff's comes to mind most readily, but there have been others. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to get anyone into trouble, and these are perhaps questions best taken up with ones advisors. Bob ----- Original Message ----- From: Koontz John E To: Siouan List Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 1:25 AM Subject: More on Experiencer Subjects and/or Pseudo-Transitives (?) > Rankin's quesitonaire on case alignment from the archives of the list: > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9902& L=siouan&D=0&P=73 > > Rankin's list of stative verbs with active meanings in Kaw from the > archives of the list: > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9903& L=siouan&P=70 > > Osage verbs of enjoyment and subjects from the archives: > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9904& L=siouan&P=R2435&D=0 > > Forms with experiencer subjects in Omaha-Ponca in the archives of the > list: > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9902& L=siouan&P=R258 > > Omaha-Ponca comparisons with Rankin's statives with active meaning from > the archives: > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9903& L=siouan&P=R484 > > There is a set of examples of Omaha-Ponca git?e and t?e in the archives of > the list at: > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0005& L=siouan&P=R620. > > John E. Koontz > http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz > From rankin at ku.edu Tue Oct 8 15:22:46 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2002 10:22:46 -0500 Subject: Job announcement Message-ID: Dear friends, Here is the official job announcement from the University of Kansas for a phonologist. Please feel free to circulate it to anyone you believe might be interested and qualified. Thanks. Best, Bob ****************************** Assistant Professor Department of Linguistics Position Announcement The Department of Linguistics at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, anticipates making a tenure-track faculty appointment at the rank of Assistant Professor beginning August 18, 2003. The position is contingent upon budgetary approval. DUTIES: .Teach two courses per semester, including LING 312/712 "Phonology I", LING 714 "Phonology II", seminar in phonology, and additional courses as appropriate to the candidate's qualifications; develop syllabi; prepare lectures; develop, administer, and grade exams. Hold regular office hours. .Carry out research within area of specialization. .Work with graduate and undergraduate student committees (thesis and dissertation) as appropriate; advise graduate and undergraduate students as appropriate. .Participate in Department, College and University committees. .Participate in Linguistics Department functions, such as the Linguistics Colloquy. REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS: Ph.D. in Linguistics with a specialization in phonology Strong record of research in phonology PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS Evidence of teaching experience APPLICATION PROCEDURES: A complete Application will include a letter of application, curriculum vitae, sample publications, and three letters of reference. Please include phone number and e-mail address. Send to: Linguistics Search Committee Department of Linguistics University of Kansas 1541 Lilac Lane Lawrence, KS 66044-3177 First priority will be given to applications received by December 1, 2002. The University of Kansas is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer; The University encourages applications from underrepresented group members. Federal and state legislation prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, age, disability, and veteran status. In addition, University policies prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, marital status, and parental status. From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Sat Oct 12 12:52:52 2002 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael Mccafferty) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2002 07:52:52 -0500 Subject: George Catlin In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Anyone in the Washington D.C. area or anyone planning on being there soon might enjoy "George Catlin and His Indian Gallery," at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian. The NY Times reported yesterday that the exhibit contains "all" of his paintings of native Americans. Michael McCafferty 307 Memorial Hall Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana 47405 mmccaffe at indiana.edu From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Sat Oct 12 20:11:07 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2002 14:11:07 -0600 Subject: Interesting Constituency Example Message-ID: I encountered this example in the Dorsey OP texts: JOD 90:117.18-19 "e=da'=daN wanitta ttaNbe=kki, what(ever) (particular) animal I see when it?e'=adhe= kki=z^i, I kill it with it when bdhathe= hnaN= maN a'=daN abdhiN" a'=bi=ama I eat it HABIT I do therefore I have it he said He said, "I have it because whenever I see an animal, then I kill it with this and eat it." The context is that the speaker has been asked why he carries a gun, a device unfamiliar to the asker. What I noticed first was that the applicative i- is, in effect, outside the infixing (incorporating) causative construction t?e=dhe 'kill' ('cause to die'). The constituency of it?e=...dhe is i-[t?e=...dhe]. I thought this was a nice example in serveral ways. For one thing, it shows layering or hierarchy in word morphology. For another it shows that inflection doesn't necessarily always occur at the highest level, though there may be forms that do extract inflection. Other examples: u'-mu=s^te 'to be left from shooting' (u'- cf. Dakota wo'-) u-mu'=xpadhe 'make fall (at a place) by shooting' I also believe it would be correct to say that the habitual or exclusive enclitic s^naN ~ hnaN ~ naN applies to the whole structure before it, not just to the last verb, i.e., habitually (see + kill + eat), or maybe see + habitually (kill + eat), but not not see + kill + habitually (eat). Note also that the a'=daN conjunction clearly applies to the whole aggregation. Probably most of those reading this last will have a reaction like "Well, duh!" but I think there may be some merit in pointing out that clause boundaries can occur in mid word. This is something that Randy deals with in his Crow grammar. Something else of interest about this example is the use of the 'when' form =kki-z^i in which =z^i ia clearly not the negative, or, at leat, does not have negative force here. From the context, perhaps it means "only when, in the case that." From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Sat Oct 12 20:50:20 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2002 14:50:20 -0600 Subject: Interesting Constituency Example In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 12 Oct 2002, Koontz John E wrote: > What I noticed first was that the applicative i- is, in effect, outside > the infixing (incorporating) causative construction t?e=dhe 'kill' ('cause > to die'). The constituency of it?e=...dhe is i-[t?e=...dhe]. Or maybe not. I've now also noticed it?e' 'to die of'. I think the nested structure is correct, because of the general use of i- as the instrumental applicative, but it would be hard to argue against it?e'. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Sat Oct 12 21:13:07 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2002 15:13:07 -0600 Subject: Dakota itazipA 'bow' Message-ID: We were speculating on the meaning of the -zipA component of the Dakota 'bow' word a while back. I think we noticed zi'pe=la 'thin, fine'. How about this, though? OP mu[u]'=zibe 'to shoot', Dorsey 90:189.9. Mu= is, of course, the shooting instrumental. This stem occurs exactly once in the texts. From rankin at ku.edu Sun Oct 13 14:50:52 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 09:50:52 -0500 Subject: Interesting Constituency Example Message-ID: I think we (read: John) are just getting to the point in Siouan grammars where we can begin to see the implications of these really interesting syntactic constructions. They even manage to get me interested in syntax, and that's saying something. > Something else of interest about this example is the use of the 'when' > form =kki-z^i in which =z^i ia clearly not the negative, or, at leat, does > not have negative force here. From the context, perhaps it means "only > when, in the case that." I guess it isn't uncommon for negatives to participate in this sort of 'irrealis' usage, cf. French sentences like Je crains qu'il ne vienne. 'I'm afraid lest s/he come'. I fear that'he NEG come(subjunct.) Bob From rankin at ku.edu Sun Oct 13 14:56:54 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 09:56:54 -0500 Subject: Dakota itazipA 'bow' Message-ID: > We were speculating on the meaning of the -zipA component of the Dakota > 'bow' word a while back. I think we noticed zi'pe=la 'thin, fine'. > How about this, though? OP mu[u]'=zibe 'to shoot', Dorsey 90:189.9. Mu= > is, of course, the shooting instrumental. This stem occurs exactly once > in the texts. I bet that's it. The only other possibility is that zibe is a borrowing from Dakotan -- a folk etymology based on itazipela. Maybe Kathy, Ardis or Catherine can check for it in other contexts. Quapaw, Kaw and Osage are all gone now. Chiwere is a possibility for related forms. Bob From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Sun Oct 13 16:54:49 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 10:54:49 -0600 Subject: Dakota itazipA 'bow' (loans and speculations) In-Reply-To: <002201c272c8$c61b51a0$e2b5ed81@computer> Message-ID: On Sun, 13 Oct 2002, R. Rankin wrote: > > We were speculating on the meaning of the -zipA component of the > > Dakota 'bow' word a while back. > The only other possibility is that zibe is a borrowing from Dakotan -- > a folk etymology based on itazipela. That latter is always a possibility, and think one that students of Siouan have tended to overlook in the past, for several reasons. I certainly find I seldom worry about it myself! For one thing, it's a simplifying assumption, if a somewhat naive one. There's a certain tendency to think as if "whitemen" encountered the Omaha in 16-something and shortly after that the Omaha got into regular communication with the Dakota groups, too, ... For another, there's a feeling - not unsupported by the available data - that loans in Siouan languages are comparatively few. Of course, loans between Siouan languages can be difficult to identify, given the similarities in phonologies and morphosyntax, and a apparent tendency to adapt phonologies in borrowings. I'm thinking of the way that ethnonyms and place names often look like cognates, though, presumably, they must have been borrowed. Or maybe not, if we allow the concept of phonological adaptation, then loans can be difficult to distinguish from calques and inheritences. If you start with an analyzable form in one language and translate it into cognate morphemes of the same meaning arranged in the same morphosyntax, you get about the same thing you would get if you inherited the form or borrowed the form intact, adapting it by the usual "correspondences" to your own phonology. There might well be differences, but they would be subtle. I wonder to what extent the often regular similarities of ethnonyms across the Siouan-speaking regions fuels the logic of recorded native speculation on ethnic origins, which take the approach that when one traces back the various Dhegiha (or Mississippi Valley, etc.) groups one finds not an as yet undiverged proto-entity, but a micro-cosm of the later (present) situation, in which all of the later groups exist, but in a harmonious community of the whole. On the other hand, that might as easily come out of things like lineal kinship systems, clan structure, and the familiar mechanics of village division. The linguistics of the situation are perhaps less likely to be causal than mutually consistent. From rankin at ku.edu Sun Oct 13 18:23:51 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 13:23:51 -0500 Subject: Dakota zipA cognates. Message-ID: I've changed my mind on the possible loanword status of Omaha -zibe. It turns out that there are quite a few related forms that tend to confirm it as a native (probably pan-) Siouan root. It's useful to look under z^ as well as z, as there are clearly related forms. Quapaw: di-zi'we 'pinch' (di- 'by hand, pulling') Dakotan: yu-z^ipa 'pinch' pa-z^ipa 'make penetrate, sting, stick w/ pin' Biloxi: sipsipi' 'pitted' Those forms are probably all cognate via fricative symbolism. There are one or two other roots with the same form(s) that are probably just homophones. They are exemplified in various dictionaries. One is to make a certain kind of noise. Quapaw: z^iz^i'we 'mutter' ziwe' 'cry out, scream' na-z^i'we 'flush out w/ the feet' Dakota had a somewhat similar term, but I forgot to write it down. Another is 'smooth, soft, mushy' Dakota: kaz^i'pa 'shave, plane smooth or flat' Cf. 'pancake' also. Winnebago: boozi'p 'mash by shooting' plus numerous other 'soft and squishy, smooth' terms. In any event, there seems to be quite a bit of evidence for John's analysis of the -zipa in 'bow' as the 'penetrate, stick a hole in' root. Bob From BARudes at aol.com Sun Oct 13 18:52:32 2002 From: BARudes at aol.com (BARudes at aol.com) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 14:52:32 EDT Subject: Dakota zipA cognates. Message-ID: You can probably push the root back to Proto-Siouan-Catawban. Catawba has the verb root sipni- 'sting' as in sipn'ihire: 'it (bee) stung it (him, her)'. Blair From lcumberl at indiana.edu Mon Oct 14 01:53:53 2002 From: lcumberl at indiana.edu (Linda A Cumberland) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 20:53:53 -0500 Subject: Dakota zipA cognates. In-Reply-To: <139.15ea1bc2.2adb1af0@aol.com> Message-ID: I've been trying to compile a list of Assiniboine verb roots over the past few weeks and I was coming to the conclusion that -zip/z^ip (based just on Assiniboine words) has to do with cutting with something sharp and/or poking gently. There's a lot of overlap between zip and z^ip. As for 'erect, as a tent' I imagine the process of poking tent poles up under the tent material to stand it up (or is this my own personal folk etymology?) and 'broadcloth' perhaps having to do with the fabrication process (ditto, last parenthetical statement). And 'bow', well, the purpose of a bow certainly is to poke something *and* cutting (at least piercing) with something sharp. Here's a selection from my list, with a couple of Doug's thrown in: iNkazipa ~ iNkaz^ipa 'a plane, for smoothing wood' iNpazipa ~ iNpaz^ipa 'a plane, for smoothing wood' iNtazipa 'bow' ozipa 'to erect, as a tent' zipena 'thin' zizipena ~ zipzipena 'broadcloth' naz^ipa 'to pinch by stepping on' paz^ipa 'to poke (the example I was given was "like getting a stick to poke an animal on the road to see if it's dead") caNkaz^ipa 'to shave wood, to whittle' yaz^ipa 'to nip lightly with the teeth' and my personal favorite: iNkpaz^ipa 'to make the sign of the cross, to cross oneself' (Doug's informant specified that this involved poking oneself') Another interesting one from Doug's Ft. Belknap consultant is: osni wiNchaz^iz^ipena 'to be a biting cold, a sharp cold, as on a clear winter day' Linda On Sun, 13 Oct 2002 BARudes at aol.com wrote: > You can probably push the root back to Proto-Siouan-Catawban. Catawba has > the verb root sipni- 'sting' as in sipn'ihire: 'it (bee) stung it (him, her)'. > > Blair > > > From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Oct 14 04:03:35 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 22:03:35 -0600 Subject: Dakota zipA cognates. In-Reply-To: <001301c272e5$af2f8700$d1b5ed81@computer> Message-ID: On Sun, 13 Oct 2002, R. Rankin wrote: > I've changed my mind on the possible loanword status of > Omaha -zibe. It turns out that there are quite a few > related forms that tend to confirm it as a native > (probably pan-) Siouan root. It's useful to look under > z^ as well as z, as there are clearly related forms. > > Quapaw: > di-zi'we 'pinch' (di- 'by hand, pulling') > > Dakotan: > yu-z^ipa 'pinch' > pa-z^ipa 'make penetrate, sting, stick w/ pin' > > Biloxi: > sipsipi' 'pitted' > > Those forms are probably all cognate via fricative > symbolism. > > There are one or two other roots with the same form(s) > that are probably just homophones. They are > exemplified in various dictionaries. > > One is to make a certain kind of noise. > > Quapaw: > z^iz^i'we 'mutter' > ziwe' 'cry out, scream' > na-z^i'we 'flush out w/ the feet' > Dakota had a somewhat similar term, but I forgot to > write it down. > > Another is 'smooth, soft, mushy' > > Dakota: > kaz^i'pa 'shave, plane smooth or flat' > Cf. 'pancake' also. > > Winnebago: > boozi'p 'mash by shooting' plus numerous other 'soft > and squishy, smooth' terms. > > In any event, there seems to be quite a bit of evidence > for John's analysis of the -zipa in 'bow' as the > 'penetrate, stick a hole in' root. > > Bob > > > From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Oct 14 05:07:27 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 23:07:27 -0600 Subject: Dakota itazipA 'bow' In-Reply-To: <002201c272c8$c61b51a0$e2b5ed81@computer> Message-ID: I got interrupted in this before everyone else went off and did their homework. So now, of course, it's something of an anti-climax! On Sun, 13 Oct 2002, R. Rankin wrote: > > How about this, though? OP mu[u]'=zibe 'to shoot', Dorsey > > 90:189.9. Mu= > is, of course, the shooting instrumental. This stem > > occurs exactly once in the texts. > I bet that's it. ... Maybe [we] can check for it in other contexts. Yesterday I quailed at the thought of this. It's always a challenge to look for other instances of instrumental roots in Siouan languages, thanks to the instrumentals themselves being prefixed and possibly hidden under datives, locatives, etc., prefixed to these. Fortunately there are only about five locatives (counting compounds) times four or five datives, etc. times ten instrumentals times about seven separately lexiconized Mississippi Valley languages ... This is a point at which the people working with Crow and Hidatsa and Mandan smile gently. There's also wa or not wa and, in fact, a not option for each of the above, if you're doing the math. One thing every good Siouan dictionary needs is a good root index. If it's computer-based, links would be nice ... I think this is not just a convenience for scholars, but a necessity for speakers, though we're plainly not clear on the extent to which any of this is productive, perhaps because it often depends on the form, and not always the constituent morphemes. A good alternative to this is a computer-based text with search tool that can handle pattern matching. Looking for words with the syllable mu is how I stumbled on mu[u]'=zibe, for example, but earlier I was looking for kkimu and wanted to find instances not initial and irregardless of accent, which was awkward. So, with regard to OP -zibe < PMV *-zip-: I thought I'd start with Winnebago, because Ken Miner does provide a root index. Since everyone leaped in with other stuff, I'll petty much leave it at that! boozip 'to mash by shooting, blowing, great force' (Da wo-) gizi'p 'to stir something soft' (Da ka-) honaNzi'p 'to smash st smeary with the feet' (similar forms with -ru- 'by hand' and -wa- 'by pushing') maNaNzi'p 'to smear with a knife' (Da wa-) razi'p 'to mouth st soft' (Da ya-) ruzi'p 'to get fingers in st soft or sticky' (Da yu-) wazi'p 'to knead' (Da pa-) woowa'zip (stative) 'to be lonesome' (wherein one experiences kneading) ziizi'p 'be watery' (perhaps better, 'be syrupy', see below) taaniN'z^u ('sugar') ziizip 'syrup' And, of course, you do have to worry about fricative ablaut or sound symbolism, which seem to effect a large percentage of instrumental roots, so ... maNaNz^i'p 'to whittle' (Da wa-) naNaNr~uz^ip 'to shave wood for kindling' ('wood' + 'to plane' below) ruz^i'p 'to plane' (Da yu-) woowa'z^ip 'wood shavings' (by pushing) (Da pa-) woomaN'z^ip 'wood shavings' (by cutting) No -ghip examples. The 'be mushy, watery' stem Bob suggests is not related, but one might want to think about wazi'p 'to knead'. That could certainly be a separate 'pinch' root -zip, but 'knead' seems to fit into the causality of making things softer, more mushy rather nicely, and it seems possible to me, given the 'pinch, sting' sense of cognates, that there could be a development from exerting a compressive force to working with a mushy, fluid substance. The z^-grade -z^i'p 'whittle, carve, plane, shave' seems eather different, and made me wonder to what extent bows are produced by whittling. I believe extensive whittling is involved, actually. If you think about the actions involved in whittling or shaving, they amount to taking a very shallow cut or nip or scallop out of something. The force exerted in more a matter of scraping than pinching, but pressure, if not compression is involved in any event, and the action of biting serves to unite the two figures. In any event, the same notions recur across MV with the same root or set of homophonous, sound symbolism-varying roots *Zip. I think capital S (and by extension Z) are the symbols used in such cases in the Comparative Siouan Dictionary manuscript. That is, in cases where a variety of sound symbolic grades or different grades are found, so that it is unclear what grade to reconstruct as original (if any). I believe that the semantic problems with this set or sets recur in the materials assembled for the CSD. There is a tendency to variability across and within languages in root semantics between manner or means and consequence, or between spatial figures in actions and sensual qualities of products. I won't try to assembles examples at this point, but this is fairly typical. Not all root sets exhibit this sort of problem, but it is not unique. JEK P.S. I looked pretty carefully manually for -c,ibe /zipe/, -zhibe /z^ipe/ and -xibe /ghipe/ examples in LaFlesche's Osage dictionary without turning up anything. Ditto in Ioway-Otoe, whre the forms would be ziwe, z^iwe, xiwe (ghiwe?), with z tending to appear as dh and z^ as z. I do not guarantee these results. I may not have looked hard enough. Swetland/Stabler give athi'c,ibe /adhi'zibe/ 'to drape', which is interesting in connection with Linda's 'erect tent' gloss. Also aga'zibe ~ adhizibe 'to flap' (note ga- 'by action of wind', dhi- cf. Da yu-, ga- cf. Da ka-). There's also ttiha' wadhi'zibe 'a tarpaulin' (lit. dwelling-skin draping'). Perhaps this is just a homophonous root, or maybe the 'make indentations' sense Linda suggests unites it with the rest. The notion that 'whittle' means 'make scallops' may apply, too, and is essentiallya variant of the former. A more expected gloss would be baz^i'be 'to poke'. There may also be a grade -ghibe in OP: It's possible that a'ghibe 'bracelet' could be 'arm-compresser' (a[a]' 'arm'). Nu[u]'de dhighi'be 'to strangle' is perhaps literally 'throat hand-compress'. But on the other hand nu[u]'de ghighi'be is 'windpipe'. Or maybe that's 'throat compressions'. Obviously you can get carried away with this sort of thing! The only safe approach is to assemble examples and look at the whole pattern and then admit that subsenses or homophones exist. In some cases looking across languages is very revealing. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Oct 14 19:11:53 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 13:11:53 -0600 Subject: Dakota zipA cognates (General comment) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I didn't have a chance to comment on this yesterday. By the time I got back to the list from family activities there was just time to finish up the Winnebago list I had started culling in the morning. I've decided to divide my comments into two parts, one general and one more specific. On Sun, 13 Oct 2002, Linda A Cumberland wrote: > I've been trying to compile a list of Assiniboine verb roots over the past > few weeks In a way the preceding is perhaps the most significant comment to come out of this whole exchange, because it sounds like this means that Linda has been compiling an Assiniboine root list which is sufficiently well developed at this point that it can casually provide 12 entries, if I didn't lose count, relevant to a single chance-mentioned root. And I was just in the proces of saying how useful things like this were! I hope this list will be published at some point! The use in comparative and etymological studies is fairly obvious, but I think that this sort of study has direct applications in language learning and morphological analysis as well. In terms of language learning, I think that direct study of lists like this is perhaps a better way to learn word formation and analysis than the various morphosyntacic approaches used in descriptive grammar, which are, essentially paradigmatic ("dehydrated") as opposed to contextual. I think we are not entirely sure to what extent a speaker of any Siouan language consciously manipulates the various morphological elements (other than pronominals and enclitics) in speaking, but I suspect a fluent speaker is at least aware of the existence of instrumentals and roots in juggling the meanings of words, even though it also seems likely that the pairings and their further derivations are usually lexicalized. Consistent with this, perhaps is the apparent instinct of Siouan speakers in setting up course materials that the essential thing is to learn vocabulary in organized ways. Grammar - syntax and inflection - are regarded as ephemera that can be learned from example in exposure to speakers; the essence of the language is the lexicon that encodes the world view. In contrast the linguist tends to feel that the grammar is the critical element and that the vocabulary can be plugged later as in as needed. The speaker says "Learn these words and by the way you'll notice I use them with this grammar." The linguist says "Learn these paradigms and by the way here are a few words to use them on." I recall that some of the moments of greatest pleasure for the Omaha speakers I worked with involved producing lists of different instrumentals with the same root, or applying sound symbolism to color terms, or, in one case, simply "Oh, I haven't used that word in a long time!" Linguists aren't oblivious to the interest of vocabulary, though they do tend to put it in terms of dehydrated formulae for derivations. ("Just add roots to produce real words!") Siouanists, however, have been repeatedly drawn to an examination of the logic of the Siouan motion verbs, Siouan kinship systems, or Siouan instrumental systems. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Oct 14 19:43:55 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 13:43:55 -0600 Subject: Dakota zipA cognates. (Specific comments) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 13 Oct 2002, Linda A Cumberland wrote: > I've been trying to compile a list of Assiniboine verb roots over the past > few weeks and I was coming to the conclusion that -zip/z^ip (based just > on Assiniboine words) has to do with cutting with something sharp and/or > poking gently. The examples support this, just as the Winnebago examples support mashing something squashy and shaving something off. It's only the sporadic 'pinching', 'nipping' ('stinging') and 'kneading' examples in the various languages that serve to possibly connect everything. I've admitted that this linkage may be imaginary on my part, while trying to suggest that encountering a somewhat diverse aggregation of ideas driving one to such speculations is a typical experience for the comparer of Siouan instrumental roots, whether operating within a language or across several. Clearly the safest or best initial approach is to restrict oneself to quite concrete similarities in meaning, but group these under root shapes, which seems to be what Linda s doing. I believe that's more or less Bob's instinct, too. On the other hand, both Linda and I seem to feel that there may well be connections among the various senses associated with particular root shapes. I think we're both driven to the notion that these connections are more a matter of specific developments, e.g., from 'poking (with poles)' to 'erecting (a tent)' that Linda suggests below, than a matter of a single abstract notion that explains all uses within a langauge (or across several). By the way "instrumental root" here means a root used with instrumentals, not a root that is an instrumental. > There's a lot of overlap between zip and z^ip. Yes, more in Assiniboine than in Winnebago, I think. > As for 'erect, as a tent' I imagine the process of poking tent poles > up under the tent material to stand it up (or is this my own personal > folk etymology?) and 'broadcloth' perhaps having to do with the > fabrication process (ditto, last parenthetical statement). And 'bow', > well, the purpose of a bow certainly is to poke something *and* > cutting (at least piercing) with something sharp. Whether or not the etymology of 'poking with poles' applies historically here, it is plausible enough. It probably works better than my idea of making scalloping sags, especially given the Plains preference for conical tents. (What's the connection on the fabrication process? All I know is that it's a heavy, dense cloth much favored for shawls.) > Here's a selection from my list, with a couple of Doug's thrown in: > > iNkazipa ~ iNkaz^ipa 'a plane, for smoothing wood' > iNpazipa ~ iNpaz^ipa 'a plane, for smoothing wood' > iNtazipa 'bow' Is iN here - at least in the first two forms - a variant of i- or something else? Note that Winnebago also has the same variability in the choice of instrumental for 'plane' (as does Teton: c^haNic^az^ipe, c^haNipaz^ipa - with different ablaut grades, too). > ozipa 'to erect, as a tent' > zipena 'thin' > zizipena ~ zipzipena 'broadcloth' These three are the most problematical in terms of finding a logic uniting the roots, but the 'erect (tent)' sense also appears in Omaha-Ponca with a root of this shape. > naz^ipa 'to pinch by stepping on' > paz^ipa 'to poke (the example I was given was > "like getting a stick to poke an animal on > the road to see if it's dead") > caNkaz^ipa 'to shave wood, to whittle' > yaz^ipa 'to nip lightly with the teeth' > > and my personal favorite: > > iNkpaz^ipa 'to make the sign of the cross, to cross > oneself' (Doug's informant specified that > this involved poking oneself') > > Another interesting one from Doug's Ft. Belknap consultant is: > > osni wiNchaz^iz^ipena 'to be a biting cold, a sharp cold, as on > a clear winter day' Here the 'pinching, biting, nipping' sense comes out very well. I think that's also involved in the Winnebago 'lonely' example, too. These are metaphors with "standard average European" analogs, too. From rankin at ku.edu Mon Oct 14 20:27:45 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 15:27:45 -0500 Subject: Dakota zipA cognates. (Specific comments) Message-ID: >On the other hand, both Linda and I seem to feel that there may well be connections among the various senses associated with particular root shapes. I think we're both driven to the notion that these connections are more a matter of specific developments, e.g., from 'poking (with poles)' to 'erecting (a tent)' that Linda suggests below, than a matter of a single abstract notion that explains all uses within a langauge (or across several). You can go crazy trying to dream up semantic connections. Personally, I conceived of the "stick a hole in" (+ maybe the "pinch") root as being one version and consigned the "smooth, plane" and the "soft, mushy" to a single root, tied together by the soft&smooth notions. I'm not sure it matters. So, are 'bridal TRAIN', choo choo TRAIN and TRAIN for the Olympics examples of homophony or polysemy? ;-) Bob From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Oct 14 21:11:55 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 15:11:55 -0600 Subject: Polysemy vs. Homophony (was RE: Dakota zipA ...) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, Rankin, Robert L wrote: > So, are 'bridal TRAIN', choo choo TRAIN and TRAIN for the Olympics examples > of homophony or polysemy? ;-) I should probably let Alan Hartley answer this one, but I think that the first two are etymologically related. Something about 'following'. I'm not sure about the second. I don't have access to a dictionary at present. Actually, in this case the point is probably moot. The existence of a historical connection doesn't mean that there is a connection in a given English speaker's mind. If things grow far enough apart, they aren't related anymore? JEK From boris at terracom.net Mon Oct 14 21:23:36 2002 From: boris at terracom.net (Alan Knutson) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 16:23:36 -0500 Subject: Polysemy vs. Homophony (was RE: Dakota zipA ...) Message-ID: Perhaps they are connected in the following chain : 1: to trail or drag 2. to aim (ie gun or binoculars) (by visually dragging across a field of view) 3. to bring to bear upon 4. to condition or educate 5. to prepare for an atletic event Alan K ----- Original Message ----- From: "Koontz John E" To: Sent: Monday, October 14, 2002 4:11 PM Subject: Polysemy vs. Homophony (was RE: Dakota zipA ...) > On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, Rankin, Robert L wrote: > > So, are 'bridal TRAIN', choo choo TRAIN and TRAIN for the Olympics examples > > of homophony or polysemy? ;-) > > I should probably let Alan Hartley answer this one, but I think that the > first two are etymologically related. Something about 'following'. I'm > not sure about the second. I don't have access to a dictionary at > present. > > Actually, in this case the point is probably moot. The existence of a > historical connection doesn't mean that there is a connection in a given > English speaker's mind. If things grow far enough apart, they aren't > related anymore? > > JEK > > From ahartley at d.umn.edu Mon Oct 14 22:58:38 2002 From: ahartley at d.umn.edu (Alan H. Hartley) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 17:58:38 -0500 Subject: Polysemy vs. Homophony (was RE: Dakota zipA ...) Message-ID: >>So, are 'bridal TRAIN', choo choo TRAIN and TRAIN for the Olympics examples >>of homophony or polysemy? ;-) > > > I should probably let Alan Hartley answer this one, but I think that the > first two are etymologically related. Something about 'following'. Yup. From rankin at ku.edu Mon Oct 14 23:50:26 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 18:50:26 -0500 Subject: Root lists. Message-ID: Back in the early '90's Wes Jones came up with a computer program (ran in DOS I'm sure) that stripped away locatives, instrumentals, etc. from dictionary files and left him/us with a long list of roots. It was very useful. I'm sure there are more sophisticated ideas about how to do this sort of thing among computer experts, but if anyone is interested, they might contact Wes. He worked his magic on the Buechel dictionary. The results required a little massaging, but it worked. Bob From lcumberl at indiana.edu Tue Oct 15 01:51:24 2002 From: lcumberl at indiana.edu (Linda A Cumberland) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 20:51:24 -0500 Subject: Root lists. In-Reply-To: <000b01c273dc$79429040$e2b5ed81@computer> Message-ID: Is that list still available somewhere? It sure would be a lot easier than sifting through Boas and Deloria! I'm finding a lot of differences between Dakota and Assiniboine in the list I have so far - roughly 300 roots. Seems to warrant continuing the search. I embarked on this project to get a handle on reduplication, since deletion and coda nasalization (the latter being a common effect at borders in Assiniboine) makes some reduplicated forms look related when they're not. But the list is proving useful in a lot of ways. Since there seems to be interest in it, I'll probably include it in my dissertation as an appendix - with the caveat that glosses are provisional! Linda On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, R. Rankin wrote: > Back in the early '90's Wes Jones came up with a > computer program (ran in > DOS I'm sure) that stripped away locatives, > instrumentals, etc. from dictionary files and left > him/us with a long list of roots. It was very useful. > I'm sure there are more sophisticated ideas about how > to do this sort of thing among computer experts, but if > anyone is interested, they might contact Wes. He > worked his magic on the Buechel dictionary. The > results required a little massaging, but it worked. > > Bob > > > From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 15 09:28:53 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 03:28:53 -0600 Subject: Root lists. In-Reply-To: <000b01c273dc$79429040$e2b5ed81@computer> Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, R. Rankin wrote: > Back in the early '90's Wes Jones came up with a computer program (ran > in DOS I'm sure) that stripped away locatives, instrumentals, etc. > from dictionary files and left him/us with a long list of roots. Actually, I believe the data extraction and reformatting on Buechel and some other sources from the Siouan Archives, was done by me. Wes did the sorting and analysis, and I think the idea may have come from the editors in general (Bob Rankin, Dick Carter, Wes Jones, and David Rood). JEK From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 15 09:35:52 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 03:35:52 -0600 Subject: Root lists. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, Linda A Cumberland wrote: > Is that list still available somewhere? It sure would be a lot easier than > sifting through Boas and Deloria! I'm finding a lot of differences between > Dakota and Assiniboine in the list I have so far - roughly 300 roots. > Seems to warrant continuing the search. It might be, and it's easy enough to repeat. The algorithm is just: 1) find headword that matches a regular expression that reprents stuff that can precede instrumentals followed by an instrumental (in the orthography of the file) 2) print unmatched coda followed by comma followed by matched header followed by first n characters of the definition followed by the page reference 3) repeat I wrote the code in AWK and processed (I think) a version of the Siouan Archives Buechel that had been recoded into the Siouan Dictionary character set we had developed for DOS. That's possibly the main problem with resuscitating the files if they still exist - being able to view the character set. > I embarked on this project to get a handle on reduplication, since > deletion and coda nasalization (the latter being a common effect at > borders in Assiniboine) makes some reduplicated forms look related when > they're not. But the list is proving useful in a lot of ways. Since > there seems to be interest in it, I'll probably include it in my > dissertation as an appendix - with the caveat that glosses are > provisional! That sounds like a good idea if space permits! JEK From rankin at ku.edu Tue Oct 15 14:21:12 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 09:21:12 -0500 Subject: Root lists. Message-ID: I'm very sorry, John! My memory is hazy and, of course, I had nothing to do with writing software. For some reason I thought that Wes had done that program up at home and had then applied it to virtually all the MVS languages we were working with. I do recall going through the output for Kansa and Quapaw (at least) to delete nouns and other items the process had been applied to by accident. Part of the "massaging" process. Bob > > Back in the early '90's Wes Jones came up with a computer program (ran > > in DOS I'm sure) that stripped away locatives, instrumentals, etc. > > from dictionary files and left him/us with a long list of roots. > > Actually, I believe the data extraction and reformatting on Buechel and > some other sources from the Siouan Archives, was done by me. Wes did the > sorting and analysis, and I think the idea may have come from the editors > in general (Bob Rankin, Dick Carter, Wes Jones, and David Rood). > > JEK > From rankin at ku.edu Tue Oct 15 14:26:39 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 09:26:39 -0500 Subject: Root lists. Message-ID: > Is that list still available somewhere? Those lists were an intermediate product, as we were doing entries for the comparative dictionary. If the raw files were retained they would be ASCII files for DOS and they would have been on the Project's computers at Boulder. The very best of those computers were probably 386's and have probably long since been put in the dumpster. I don't know if the disk files were saved or not. It's possible. John and David would be the ones to ask. The nice thing about retrieving those files would be the fact that we had culled through them and eliminiated nouns, adverbs, etc. already, I think. Bob From lcumberl at indiana.edu Tue Oct 15 19:25:00 2002 From: lcumberl at indiana.edu (Linda A Cumberland) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 14:25:00 -0500 Subject: Root lists. In-Reply-To: <001f01c27456$e0d72200$c0b5ed81@computer> Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, R. Rankin wrote: > > Is that list still available somewhere? > > The nice thing about retrieving those files would be > the fact that we had culled through them and > eliminiated nouns, adverbs, etc. already, I think. So I guess the next question is whether there is a hard copy somewhere? Regardless of John's assertion that "it's easy enough to repeat", "easy" is a relative term! And I'm not too likely to undertake such a thing. and anyway, it sounds as though a great deal of work was done on the output, and by a team of people with lots more expertise than I have. But thanks for the algorithm, John. I'll show it to Wally Hooper (at the Institute) and see what he thinks. Linda From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Wed Oct 16 00:18:35 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 18:18:35 -0600 Subject: Root lists. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Linda A Cumberland wrote: > But thanks for the algorithm, John. I'll show it to Wally Hooper (at > the Institute) and see what he thinks. Wally's going to laugh at my calling it an algorithm. It's incredibly simple. The idea is that you have a database which, in simple terms, looks like this: hw bazi'be def pinch ref page 2 hw zaN'de def grive ref page 4 hw a'baz^ibe def raise tent ref page 10 and you search hw fields for patterns like ^(wa|we|a|u|i|)(ga|ba|bi|dha|dhi|mu|ma|na|naN) (i.e., a start of form followed by any of wa, we, etc., or nothing followed by any of ga, ba, etc. You might want to add possessive, etc., forms, e.g., insert {gi|g|kki|) into the list between the other two sublists, etc. You have to allow for e from agi, and some other complications I haven't allowed for, but this is the general idea. When you match a form with this pattern you've got the part it matched and (with a bit more added to the pattern) also the part not matched, and you print the two in reverse order with a comma and a space between them and the defintion and reference appended, getting, e.g., zibe, ba- pinch page 2 z^ibe, a'ba- raise tent page 10 You sort the output on the first field and you're there. Imagine many more examples, of course, to make it interesting. I've neglected accent, but you can handle that by deleting accent marks before doing the match or by allowing 1 or no accent marks after each list item, etc. The second approach is probably better, since you have the accents to reinsert. Note that one can cross compare several languages by inserting in from of each line in the output a "back reconsruction" of the supposed root. For example, replace all b with p and all final e with -, yielding zip- zibe, ba- pinch page 2 z^ip- z^ibe, a'ba- raise tent page 10 Then sort again. Here I'm back transforming Omaha, but if you had an IO file with dhiwe, gi- whittle ... ghiwe, ba- gouge .... that would bve processed by substituting p for w, z for dh and - for final e to yield zip- dhiwe, ga- whittle ... ghip- ghiwe, ba- gouge ... These could be sorted together with lists from other languages because the sort keys (the first fields) are commensurate. You can get a lot out of simple operations like match, extract, transform, and sort. Of course, you need the databases to start with, and there's where the Siouan Archives come in, as well as other files assembled by others. Also, you need a tool that does operations like this. At present the easiest are scripting languages like AWK, TCL, Perl, and so on. SNOBOL or SPITBOL would work, too, or the internal scripting languages built into some text editors, like emacs and its relatives. I say easiest, but some of these may not strike some folks as easy. JEK From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Wed Oct 16 04:49:05 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 22:49:05 -0600 Subject: Root lists. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Koontz John E wrote: > hw bazi'be > def pinch > ref page 2 ... I should point out that I made those examples up, though they may look moderately plausible, or be correct by accident. I'm sorry about the various typos. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Wed Oct 16 05:03:06 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 23:03:06 -0600 Subject: Root lists. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Linda A Cumberland wrote: > So I guess the next question is whether there is a hard copy somewhere? You'd want the files before the hard copy. Anything to avoid scanning or keying. I've checked and I don't happen to have the files on my present system. I have one of the old systems at the house, though I haven't fired it up recently, and don't have easy access to it at the moment. We were pretty assiduous when I was at the Plains Center about copying forward old files to new systems. And we kept working files around. The volumnious files we accumulated occupied shockingly little space on newer hard drives. We also kept a lot of working files on 5.25 in diskettes, though the problem now is to find a drive to read those ... As Bob says, the character encodings were non-standard, though we used the same one across all CSD files. And the same several in preparing printed copies. I think three is a good chance these files still exist and could be used with a little effort. JEK From rood at spot.Colorado.EDU Wed Oct 16 19:11:08 2002 From: rood at spot.Colorado.EDU (ROOD DAVID S) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2002 13:11:08 -0600 Subject: Root lists. In-Reply-To: <001f01c27456$e0d72200$c0b5ed81@computer> Message-ID: I still have one of the computers we used in those days, with all its files intact. If someone wants to look for those lists, you're welcome to come to my office and do so. You will have to remember how to use pre-Windows operating systems. David S. Rood Dept. of Linguistics Univ. of Colorado 295 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0295 USA rood at colorado.edu On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, R. Rankin wrote: > > Is that list still available somewhere? > > Those lists were an intermediate product, as we were > doing entries for the comparative dictionary. If the > raw files were retained they would be ASCII files for > DOS and they would have been on the Project's computers > at Boulder. The very best of those computers were > probably 386's and have probably long since been put in > the dumpster. I don't know if the disk files were > saved or not. It's possible. John and David would be > the ones to ask. > > The nice thing about retrieving those files would be > the fact that we had culled through them and > eliminiated nouns, adverbs, etc. already, I think. > > Bob > From rood at spot.Colorado.EDU Wed Oct 16 19:16:19 2002 From: rood at spot.Colorado.EDU (ROOD DAVID S) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2002 13:16:19 -0600 Subject: Root lists. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Bob, at one of the Siouan conferences -- seems like maybe with MidAmerica in Stillwater or maybe Lawrence (?) Wes reported on that work, I think. It went along with his conclusions about "root extensions", i.e. the idea that the outside consonants in CCVC or CVCC roots are a very old layer of derivational morphology. If you have your conference handouts organized in some way (I could probably find mine with a few hours of searching, but I don't have time for that now) you might locate his handouts. David David S. Rood Dept. of Linguistics Univ. of Colorado 295 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0295 USA rood at colorado.edu On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Linda A Cumberland wrote: > > > On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, R. Rankin wrote: > > > > Is that list still available somewhere? > > > > The nice thing about retrieving those files would be > > the fact that we had culled through them and > > eliminiated nouns, adverbs, etc. already, I think. > > So I guess the next question is whether there is a hard copy somewhere? > Regardless of John's assertion that "it's easy enough to repeat", "easy" > is a relative term! And I'm not too likely to undertake such a thing. and > anyway, it sounds as though a great deal of work was done on the output, > and by a team of people with lots more expertise than I have. > > But thanks for the algorithm, John. I'll show it to Wally Hooper (at > the Institute) and see what he thinks. > > Linda > > From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 1 00:09:25 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 18:09:25 -0600 Subject: Fw: Error Condition Re: Re: transitivity, etc, In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, Shannon West wrote: > > Whatever principles or diagnostics enable you to select as subject the > > agent if present, and the patient if not, will probably support the > > experiencer as subject, too. > > Thanks John. I haven't needed to use semantic roles for the most part, and > likely won't be (gotta work within theory restrictions, and for now that's > Minimalism). So, if I may ask, how does one Minimally determine what the subject is for "ordinary clauses" without double statives? Is it a question of instinct/ definition, or, as Bob puts it, translating into English and noting what the subject is there? I don't ask [just] to be difficult. I'm actually curious how this is done. When I used the phrase "whatever principles of diagnostics" I actually had this in mind as a possibility. My feeling is that *whatever* scheme one uses to identify subject, the experiencer of experiencer verbs will turn out to be the subject. In short, if you're allowed to gloss this over for "ordinary clauses,", your advisors are going to be perfectly satisfied with glossing it over for experiencer clauses. Or, if not, then whatever scheme you use is probably going to come up subject for experiencers, too. In any event, even if subjects are effectively givens of a theory there should be extratheoretical heuristics to identify them, as Keenan made his reputation by observing. To air my own dirty linen, the way I do it in Omaha-Ponca is that, by way of a shorthand for Bob's translational scheme, I define subject as the agent of transitive and active verbs, and the patient of stative verbs. In doing so I have neglected the experiencer verbs, of course, or, rather, I have swept them up with the statives, making that term also cover two argument verbs that can only have one patient marker, and taking that argument that can be so-marked as the subject. These cases turn out to be what we've been calling experiencer or sometimes, somewhat innacurately, dative-subject verbs. I haven't addressed two-patient verbs, because I haven't elicited or discovered any. In support of this arbitrary definitional approach, I can point out that the class of arguments so defined is the same class that takes the proximate subject articles akha and ama and (as recently illustrated) governs agent concord in various auxiliaries, and miNkhe/niNkhe/akha/ama concord in certain others. Of course, there are those awkward cases of "non-subject" or "obviative subject" articles, in which articles more typically used with objects appear with subjects, and there are also some oblique uses of akha/ama, too, but in Dhegiha circles these are both reasily accepted as special cases, so, I have a heuristic approach or two, as well. Unfortunately, the article heuristic won't work for Dakota (or anything but Dhegiha), though the auxiliary-concord one might. These heuristics apply within clauses. I don't at present have any heristics arising from behavior across clauses (argument identifications, extractability, etc.), though I suspect such arguments exist and would be useful in Dakota, too. I suppose I get away with this because I've largely ignored syntax to date! JEK From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 1 01:03:46 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 19:03:46 -0600 Subject: ordering of person markers In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, Shannon West wrote: > I know that this is the diachronic explanation, but that doesn't offer a > synchronic explanation. The speakers of the language don't know the > historical background, and can't use that to figure out which positions > these affixes appear. I'm wondering why they can't use the learned output of the historical process to decide what order things go in? Eric Hamp is said to be exceptional in this regard, but I'm pretty sure most of us just learn how it works from the way it is in our own lifetimes. Including literary exposure to earlier models, of course. The models are somewhat fuzzy, of course, because we are exposed to a population of varying examples, not one uniform model. I know for a fact that my modifier order parameter tends to flicker among several states. > Your diachronic explanation would have to be fitted with a templatic > account. I don't so much mind templates, but they're not exactly > popular right now, if you know what I mean. Templates don't work very well with Siouan languages, I think. Omaha-Ponca may be a bit fuller of nasty subcases and exceptions than Dakota, but it isn't too different in general nature. I think it's more a a situation with a set of morphosyntactic rules for adding given affixes, some of which conflict. In a general sort of way the derivational rules go before the pronominalization rules, but I know of a horrendous class of exceptions involving datives in Omaha-Ponca. (I mentioned this in passing this weekend.) The data in Dakota are substantially simpler, but my recollection is that comparable cases occur there. There are at least cases of ki merging with multiple pronouns, if not with pronouns a slot or two away from it. > Right now, the general feeling is that there should be rules that the > learner can use to figure out where things go rather than templates to > learn. Templates are certainly a kind of rule, but maybe you mean rules of a more fashionable sort? Or are we using template in different ways? I'm thinking in terms of templates as lists of position classes: knee-bones go before thigh bones go before pelvises, etc. The problem with this approach in Omaha-Ponca is that while first and second person pronouns generally go after outer instrumentals and similarly located "preverbs" they also go before reflexive/reciprocals and reflexive-possessives, and these are perfectly capable of being placed in front of preverbs, with the result that you get PRO(1,2) > REFL > PREVERB instead of PREVERB > PRO(1, 2), even though combining rules like PREVERB > PRO(1,2) and PRO(1,2) > REFL might lead you to expect PREVERB > PRO(1.2) > REFL. Of course, you actually get both orders, depending on the stem. Another kind of problem: all pronouns of the form V (reg A1, reg P1, A12) pop out of position and plop down in from of an initial wa, if they aren't too deeply buried in the stem, e.g., a-wa-naN?aN, but wa-z^u=a-he (? from memory). (And wa-dha-naN?aN and wa-b-dhathe.) There's certainly a general, rule-based principle involved, but it's a mix of phonology and morphosyntax and has no (direct) cross-linguistic generality. Yet another kind of problem: aN A12 goes before the locatives a and u (*o) and after i, while wa P3p goes before a and i, but after u (not counting fossilized u'- < *wa-o). And wa- ~ wa...a- P12 goes before a and u and around i (and becomes a-wa- with the causative). This mostly makes historical sense - not all of it - and doesn't seem to depend on any general principle at all, except possibly that the perversity of OP morphology tends to a maximum. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 1 01:25:19 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 19:25:19 -0600 Subject: ordering of person markers In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, ROOD DAVID S wrote: > See Bob's Soapbox Address. The synchronic explanation IS the diachronic > one -- that's the order that speakers learn and use. Templates may not be > popular, but they are what people do!! I'm convinced that these things > are memorized as chunks (wichun 'we-them', chi 'I-you"), etc., even in > English, where 'you and I' is learned as a unit and I is no longer > declinable ("for you and I" is used by speakers who would never say "for I"). In this sense templates cover the rules I was thinking of, too, and I agree that they help explain cases like 'for you and I' or embedding between verbs and satelite particles, etc. One difficulty with trying to reduce Dakotan pronominal ordering to a general principle, even ignoring two-patient verbs, and abstracting the far more critical and determining issue of where particular pronominals go, is that the existance of chunks like c^hi defeats even the possibility of meaningful generalizations. How can we call first > second a general principle if it's supported by maNya and c^hi or maNya and uN(k)(...)ya. One can only call c^hi a case of 1 > 2 on diachronic grounds entirely inobvious within Dakota. And uN(k) and maN are a fairly dubious semantic class, and certainly not a morphosyntactic one. Really there isn't enough data to make any generalizations. Another lovely OP example: the I > you form for dh-stems (y-stems in Dakota) is wi-b-, as in wi-b-dhithe 'I touched you' (sorry - an example considered obscene, but the best I could come up with from memory). I suppose wi-b-dhaxube 'I spoke of you as mysterious' might work, though it's also a bit unusual. Historically this is something like *w-(y)i-w-r... with a repeated first person. But repeated pronominals (and multiple ones, on old and current serial verbs, and on verbs and enclitic auxiliaries) are common in Siouan morphologies. JEK From rankin at ku.edu Tue Oct 1 01:55:14 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 20:55:14 -0500 Subject: synchronic and diachronic "explanation". Message-ID: > I know that this is the diachronic explanation, but that doesn't offer a > synchronic explanation. The speakers of the language don't know the > historical background, and can't use that to figure out which positions > these affixes appear. This canard gets a lot of repetition from theoreticians and is routinely used as an excuse not to study history. The fact is that your average 3 year old doesn't need to know the history of his language in order to place morphemes/words in the order of their historical addition/development. All the child has to do is LEAVE THE SYNTAX ALONE and just keep it the way s/he heard it from his or her peers/family. Take the case of Chinese "ba" for example. The kid doesn't know 'ba' used to be a real, active verb. He just leaves it where it was, and that turns out to be the historical order. Or take the Siouan 1st dual/plural and Dakotan 3rd pl. animate pronominal prefixes as another example. Both certainly appear to be old incorporated nouns meaning 'man, person' in the various languages. The kid doesn't know they used to be nouns. He just leaves 'em alone in the position that incorporanda go (or went) in the verb complex at the time they were grammaticalized. And, presto, the pronouns in Siouan occur in very peculiar orders. The whole thing isn't because the child did or did not know the history of the language: it's because he left his morphotactics alone and DIDN'T apply any "universal principles". What's left is the historical ordering. The whole claim about history being irrelevant because people don't have direct access to diachrony is a red herring. You can't divorce history from synchrony. As for templates, that paper the 4 of us wrote for Bob Dixon and Sacha Aikhenvald's volume on the "Word" as a linguistic concept discusses the problem of templates in Siouan at length, showing that they don't (and can't) work very well for principled reasons -- mostly historical of course, Bob > Your diachronic explanation would have to be fitted > with a templatic account. I don't so much mind templates, but they're not > exactly popular right now, if you know what I mean. Right now, the general > feeling is that there should be rules that the learner can use to figure out > where things go rather than templates to learn. > > The SOV order isn't fixed for the double statives in my data, but I do need > to check this out again. > > Shannon > From CaRudin1 at wsc.edu Tue Oct 1 14:09:07 2002 From: CaRudin1 at wsc.edu (Catherine Rudin/HU/AC/WSC) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 09:09:07 -0500 Subject: synchronic and diachronic "explanation". Message-ID: At the risk of making myself unpopular on the list, I'd like to stick up for the idea that synchrony is NOT always just frozen diachrony. People do certainly memorize fossilized sequences, and many things can certainly be explained that way, but speakers do also sometimes reanalyze, reorder, create novel combinations... I don't have the time or the concentration this morning to provide good examples (I've been lurking through this whole conversation mostly for time-and-concentration reasons) -- some of John's examples of ordering exceptions in Omaha might do, and there are interesting cases in Romance and Slavic clitic orders etc. if only I could remember how they go... Anyhow -- while it may well be true that affix sequences in Siouan are memorized chunks, historical fossils that children learn by rote, ridiculing the idea of even looking for possible synchronic analyses strikes me as much too harsh. As Shannon says, speakers don't know the history (and no, I don't consider this a canard) -- they do learn many things that are the result of history, but unless all orders of all possible morpheme combinations are memorized, making all new word formation impossible, there MUST be synchronic, psychologically "real" morphological rules as well. Catherine From rood at spot.Colorado.EDU Tue Oct 1 15:47:03 2002 From: rood at spot.Colorado.EDU (ROOD DAVID S) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 09:47:03 -0600 Subject: synchronic and diachronic "explanation". In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Catherine has raised a voice of reason, of course -- languages do change, and when they change it's often in predictable directions. But to insist that the ONLY thing children learning a language can use for tools is universal grammar is an extreme position that does not take very much effort to refute. People are very good at learning lists for both irregular paradigms and grammatical constructions. And I would argue that naive speakers of a language DO know the history of their language in the same sense that they "know" the grammar rules that apply to their language: because they have learned patterns and can generalize from them, they BEHAVE AS IF they had that knowledge, even when they can't articulate it. English speakers know about umlauted plurals and demonstrate that knowledge every time they say "geese" or "feet". I have just shown my undergraduates once again that they know about verb raising to I in English for the copula because they prefer "she always works hard" but "she is always on time", with "always" on different sides of the conjugated verb depending on what the verb is. That's no different, to my mind, than the "knowledge" that wicha precedes uNk and uNk precedes both ya and ni. David S. Rood Dept. of Linguistics Univ. of Colorado 295 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0295 USA rood at colorado.edu On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, Catherine Rudin/HU/AC/WSC wrote: > > At the risk of making myself unpopular on the list, I'd like to stick up > for the idea that synchrony is NOT always just frozen diachrony. People do > certainly memorize fossilized sequences, and many things can certainly be > explained that way, but speakers do also sometimes reanalyze, reorder, > create novel combinations... I don't have the time or the concentration > this morning to provide good examples (I've been lurking through this whole > conversation mostly for time-and-concentration reasons) -- some of John's > examples of ordering exceptions in Omaha might do, and there are > interesting cases in Romance and Slavic clitic orders etc. if only I could > remember how they go... > > Anyhow -- while it may well be true that affix sequences in Siouan are > memorized chunks, historical fossils that children learn by rote, > ridiculing the idea of even looking for possible synchronic analyses > strikes me as much too harsh. > > As Shannon says, speakers don't know the history (and no, I don't consider > this a canard) -- they do learn many things that are the result of history, > but unless all orders of all possible morpheme combinations are memorized, > making all new word formation impossible, there MUST be synchronic, > psychologically "real" morphological rules as well. > > Catherine > > From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 1 16:01:25 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 10:01:25 -0600 Subject: synchronic and diachronic "explanation". In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, Catherine Rudin/HU/AC/WSC wrote: > At the risk of making myself unpopular on the list, I'd like to stick up > for the idea that synchrony is NOT always just frozen diachrony. I don't know that this is an unpopular stand. I think everybody agrees that syntax changes, by changes in interpretation, by addition of new constructions, and by changes in order. I think Bob's point was only that one doesn't have to know and recapitulate the history of a form to produce it. Synchrony grows out of diachrony, but history is change as well as inheritence. Or putting it another way, history is as much a general principle as any synchronic generalization. I've always suspected that universal principles are simply the aggregate effect of initial states, phonological changes of several sorts, and reanalysis. > some of John's examples of ordering exceptions in Omaha might do, and > there are interesting cases in Romance and Slavic clitic orders etc. > if only I could remember how they go... I don't know how the Romance and Slavic clitic arguments go, either, though I've heard the Romance ones cited as specific examples of diachronic forms having been reordered by reanalysis. I believe also that the "infixed" location of pronominals in both Athabascan and Caddoan reflects to some extent phonological rules, to the extent that the placement of pronominals may actually be in mid-morpheme (and certainly is in mid-stem), in a historical sense. So, while the tendency to infix the pronominals may arise from diachronic considerations such as original order, the location of infixation can be adjusted in various ways and may be determined by subsequent principles, which, in the case of Navajo, can be reduced to contemporary phonological principles. I think my authority on this is a paper by Peggy Speas. I'm not sure the Caddoan cases are reducible to synchronic rules. I heard a report of this from David Rood, but he spared me the details. In Siouan morphology or morphosyntax infixed pronominals always seem to go nicely between morphemes, but the shape of morphemes is generally close to the shape of canonical syllables (or sequences of them), and, of course, there are a number of infixing stems whose constituency isn't actually understood diachronically, so this apparent regularity may be a matter of phonological chance and our ignorance. However, one good class of examples of reanalysis in Siouan morphology would be the common occurrence of pleonastic regular pronominals placed over irregular ones, e.g., modern Omaha attaN'be, dhas^taN'be, daNba'(=i) from earlier ttaN'be, s^taN'be, daNba=i 'I/you/(s)he saw'. I believe LaFlesche gives a comparable pattern of inflection for Osage paN 'to call', showing to have been, originally, a p-stem, though Omaha baN has been regular from the date of detailed knowledge of the language. This tendency has reformulated whole paradigms in Winnebago and Ioway-Otoe, and probably explains the limpid regularity of all but two verbs in Mandan. Another good class of examples is the migration of pronominals from infixed position to initial position, e.g., while OP kku=...he is infixing, I know that some languages treat the stem *hko=phe as prefixing (I'm not sure which at the moment). Related to this is the tendency to reduce multiply inflected stems to singly inflected stems. I believe the various attested paradigms of Dakota hiyu reflect this. Another example I think I recall is that IO guNra is singly inflected, while OP gaN=dha 'to want' has both roots inflected. These tendencies aren't absolute. I can think of probable reversals. For example, I seem to recall that Dakota has converted the inner instrumental naN 'by foot' into an outer instrumental, probably on the model of the *Ra 'by heat' instrumental, which is outer. And I'm pretty sure that the pattern of double inflection with the Omaha-Ponca suus of stop stems, agippaghe, dhagis^kaghe, gikkaghe ('to make one's own') results from over generalization of the simple paradigm ppaghe, s^kaghe, gaghe on some simpler original like *agikkaghe, *dhagikkaghe, *gikkaghe, perhaps under the influence of the dative, which is eppaghe, dhes^kaghe, giaghe. I apologize for the fuzziness of some of the examples here. I'm working from memory. JEK From smcginnis at nflc.org Tue Oct 1 18:48:19 2002 From: smcginnis at nflc.org (McGinnis, Scott) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 14:48:19 -0400 Subject: Second National Conference on Heritage Languages in America Message-ID: October 18-20, 2002 SECOND NATIONAL CONFERENCE HERITAGE LANGUAGES IN AMERICA To request a pre-registration brochure (with a poster that you can display), visit: http://www.cal.org/heritage/request.asp To register and read more about the conference, visit: http://www.cal.org/heritage/conferences/2002/ Please note that although the deadline for reduced registration has passed, you can still register electronically prior to coming to the conference. This Second National Conference will seek to further the aims of the Heritage Languages Initiative, a national effort to develop the non-English language resources that exist in our communities. It will bring together heritage language community and school leaders, representatives from pre-K-12 schools and colleges and universities, world-renowned researchers, and federal and state policymakers. The goals of the Heritage Languages Initiative and this conference are to continue to make manifest the personal, economic, and social benefits to our nation of preserving and developing the languages spoken by those living in this country; to build a national dialogue on this topic; and to develop an action agenda for the next several years. From rankin at ku.edu Tue Oct 1 20:02:50 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 15:02:50 -0500 Subject: synchronic and diachronic "explanation". Message-ID: > At the risk of making myself unpopular on the list, I'd like to stick up > for the idea that synchrony is NOT always just frozen diachrony. People do > certainly memorize fossilized sequences, and many things can certainly be > explained that way, but speakers do also sometimes reanalyze, reorder, > create novel combinations... Don't worry, you won't be unpopular; in fact I was hoping/expecting you might weigh in. Let's be clear though on the fact that NO linguist claims that "synchrony is ... *always* just frozen diachrony." I think the reverse is more often true, especially among (the increasing number of) linguists who are totally unfamiliar with historical/comparative work. I guess I do have one or two more observations that bear on our discussion though. > Anyhow -- while it may well be true that affix sequences in Siouan are > memorized chunks, historical fossils that children learn by rote, > ridiculing the idea of even looking for possible synchronic analyses > strikes me as much too harsh. Ridicule might be a little strong, BUT, it seems to me that there is no reason to look for synchronic explanation of word or morpheme order that has not actually changed. And to know that, the linguist (not the speaker/learner) has to know what has changed and what hasn't. The ordering of Dakotan /wicha-/, /uNk-/, /ma- & ni-/, /wa- & ya-/ does not require synchronic "explanation" because we know it represents the order of addition to the system. If that order were to change, and, say, /uNk-/ were to suddenly join the same position class as /wa- & ya-/, THEN an explanation is called for. I think theoreticians miss a really good bet by not studying the morphosyntactic histories of their target languages, because it is precisely where the word or morpheme order has changed that they will find their BEST EVIDENCE for UG ordering principles. Whether the learner knows language history is irrelevant to the argument that the linguist and ESPECIALLY the theoretician needs to know it. If the theoretician doesn't know the history, how can s/he know what orderings represent changes and, thus, are due to internalized rules/principles/ constraints, and what orderings are due to accidents of history (and, thus do not require explanation in terms of rules/constraints)? The REordering of postposed pronominals in, say, Mongolian, obviously requires "explanation", but the (historically conservative) ordering of the Siouan pronominals (above) does not. It's a waste of time to search for "principles" where the learner just took the path of least resistence and learned the order mama's way. But ya gotta know which is which! > As Shannon says, speakers don't know the history (and no, I don't consider > this a canard) -- I guess, from my perspective, I still do, for reasons given previously and above. I find it a poor excuse for ignoring much of linguistic scholarship (and an excuse that Slavicists and Romanists like ourselves were never allowed to get away with!). I have to admit though, that historical linguists have been piss-poor ambassadors for their subject. Historical and comparative linguistics has often been taught from materials and by instructors that ignored all the synchronic and theoretical consequences of language history. I've surveyed the historical chapters of a number of popular intro textbooks, and I must say I've been very dismayed by what I've found. Many -- no, most -- such chapters are just a string of cute anecdotes about vocabulary, a boring presentation of the Pater Noster in Old and Middle English, a handful of Indo-European cognates and a couple of trivial examples of "drive:drove::dive:dove" analogy -- plus a few paragraphs of (forgive me)Labovian drivel. We should make sure that these chapters are written by real practicioners of the discipline, and not just assigned as an additional task to the poor fellow who penned the phonology chapter. But I'm preaching again . . . . :-) Bob From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 1 23:38:00 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 17:38:00 -0600 Subject: Algonquian Parellel? Muskogean Parallel? Message-ID: It occurs to me that I've heard of a class of verbs in Algonquian languages that are similar to Omaha-Ponca (et al.) 'to lack; not to have'. The characteristic of 'to lack; not to have' is that it takes two arguments, but only the person lacking the thing can be non-third person and govern concord, at least as I have encountered the verb. Thus, with made up examples: neghe=the aNdhiNge pot the I don't have neghe=the dhidhiNge pot the you don't have neghe=the dhiNga=i pot the he doesn't have But: *I don't have you. *He doesn't have you. Aside from the wrinkle that the inflectional prefixes are patient (object, stative) forms, which leads to a sort of experiencer analysis ('me lacketh' or 'I lack' rather than 'I don't have'), this reminds me of certain Algonquian transitive stems I've heard of that agree only with the subject, not the object. (I hope it was that way, and not the reverse!) Were these called pseudo-intransitives or pseudo-transitives? Or maybe half(-assed) transitives? Is there a parallel in Muskogean, too? I seem to recall reading that Chickasaw (?) had a class of experiencer verbs in addition to a more or less Siouan-ish active/stative/transitive pattern. I hope I'm not hallucinating this ... Oh, did I say that out loud? From munro at ucla.edu Wed Oct 2 00:19:40 2002 From: munro at ucla.edu (Pamela Munro) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 17:19:40 -0700 Subject: Algonquian Parellel? Muskogean Parallel? Message-ID: You're not hallucinating, John. Muskogean languages certainly have "a class of experiencer verbs", by which I assume you might mean dative subject verbs (if people will allow me that phrasing). So we have, like Siouan, a typical "active" system with (as I call them) -- class I subject intransitive verbs (similar to e.g. Lakhota wa- 'I'), primarily active; -- class II subject intransitive verbs (similar to e.g. Lakhota ma- 'I'), primarily non-active; -- class I subject, class II object transitive verbs. We also have class III "datives", which can be either objects or subjects. As objects, they can be the only object (with verbs like Chickasaw i-hollo 'love' [I am writing nasal vowels as underlined; if this does not come across in your email let me know and I can send this to you another way], which takes a I subject, III object [with the dative prefix im-]) or can be a second object added to an ordinary transitive, as with im-pilachi 'send to'. As subjects, they are typically intransitive (e.g. in-takho'bi 'be lazy'). However, we also have occasional transitive II and III subject verbs, such as banna 'want' (II subject) and im-alhkaniya 'forget' (III subject). These, like the 'lack' verbs that have been the subject of recent discussion, take a subject that may be non-third person, but must have a third person object: Ofi' sa-banna. 'I want a dog' dog 1sII-want Ofi' am-alhkaniya. 'I forget the dog' dog 1sIII.dat-forget Hattak-at ofi' banna. 'The man wants a dog' man-nom dog want Hattak-at ofi' im-alhkaniya. 'The man forgets the dog' man-nom dog dat-forget Muskogean, unlike Siouan, has nominal case marking, so we know that it is the wanter or the forgetter who is the subject, despite the verb agreement. (We could add nominative pronouns to the first two sentences for emphasis if we wanted. But usually we don't want. There are numerous other syntactic subject tests, too, all of which agree on what the subject is here.) Further: In Chickasaw only one object can agree. So 'send to' for example cannot have a non-third person patient, even though the simple transitive pilachi 'send' can. (In some languages, such as Choctaw, this is not the case, and you can get three agreeing arguments on a verb.) Moreover, some Choctaw speakers allow a non-third person patient for 'want', so you can have two II markers on the same verb. No Chickasaw speaker I've worked with allows this, though. Pam -- Pamela Munro Professor Department of Linguistics UCLA Box 951543 Los Angeles Ca 90095-1543 http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/linguistics/people/munro/munro.htm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jpboyle at midway.uchicago.edu Wed Oct 2 00:36:43 2002 From: jpboyle at midway.uchicago.edu (John Boyle) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 19:36:43 -0500 Subject: Fw: Error Condition Re: Re: transitivity, etc, In-Reply-To: <000501c26835$403efb60$6436688e@macdonald> Message-ID: > > -----Original Message----- >> From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu >> [mailto:owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu]On Behalf Of R. Rankin >> Sent: September 29, 2002 4:16 PM >> To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu >> Subject: Re: Fw: Error Condition Re: Re: transitivity, etc, >> >> >> I think all the MVS languages have this pattern with at >> least a few of those "experiencer" verbs. They're not >> just Dakotan, and you can get two stative pronominals. >> Membership in the class varies, just as stative-status >> does across Siouan. >> >> If you believe that "subject" is part of "UG", then you >> have verbs with stative subjects acting transitively on >> objects -- both marked w/ pronominals from the >> "stative" set. > >I'm wondering about this too. Given that I do have to work with a 'subject', >a work-around is going to be in order. Is there any chance that the either >the subject or object of these verbs is different in some way? A dative >perhaps? (I'm grasping at straws). Also, is there some ordering difference >with these? I have a set that is completely incomprehensible to me. > >Linda? Do you have a set of these in Nakota? Any idea at all how they work, >because they seem to be out to lunch and completely different from many of >the Lakhota ones. > >Shannon >(I am *so* hoping to deal with this as a 'I don't know how this works, it >requires further study'. ) Hi All, I don't think 'subject' is a part of UG at lease in a GB/MP framework (although it is in a LFG/RG framework). As a matter of fact, the primacy of grammatical relations (subject, object, indirect object, etc.) is denied in GB/MP. These relations are derived from other primitives. There properties emerge from various components of the grammar (structural position, case, theta-theory, etc.) There should be no rule/transformation that refers to "subject" that can't be formulated in terms of "agent" (theta-role) or "higest NP in the clause" (position) or "nominative" (case). For more on this see James McCloskey's article on subjects in Haegeman's 1999 Elements of Grammar. It is a good overview of all of the relevant arguments and decompositions. I'm not quite sure how to look at these types of double stative verbs, but we should be able to come up with something. --John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From voorhis at westman.wave.ca Wed Oct 2 13:54:57 2002 From: voorhis at westman.wave.ca (voorhis at westman.wave.ca) Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 08:54:57 -0500 Subject: Algonquian Parellel? Muskogean Parallel? Message-ID: Koontz John E wrote: > > It occurs to me that I've heard of a class of verbs in Algonquian > languages that are similar to Omaha-Ponca (et al.) 'to lack; not to have'. > The characteristic of 'to lack; not to have' is that it takes two > arguments, but only the person lacking the thing can be non-third person > and govern concord, at least as I have encountered the verb. > Aside from the wrinkle that the inflectional prefixes are patient (object, > stative) forms, which leads to a sort of experiencer analysis ('me > lacketh' or 'I lack' rather than 'I don't have'), this reminds me of > certain Algonquian transitive stems I've heard of that agree only with the > subject, not the object. There are such stems. But the absent affixed object pronouns can be expressed by independent pronouns. For example, a Kickapoo man addressing peyote said: nekiisinaacihie kiai 'I sought help from you' containing ne- 'I', naacihiee- 'seek help from' with the long ee shortened when final, k- 'your', -iai 'self' usually reflexive but also serving as a second-person inanimate pronoun -- peyote is inanimate in Kickapoo. Of course, modern Algonquian languages cannot reproduce the stative vs. active contrast of Siouan and Muskogean because they mostly use the same pronominal affixes for both subject and object, sorting out the reference with the so-called theme signs, though the latter must have been object pronouns originally. > (I hope it was that way, and not the reverse!) > Were these called pseudo-intransitives or pseudo-transitives? Or maybe > half(-assed) transitives? My take on the pseudo-intransitives is that they are just intransitive verbs that seem to contain a morpheme that usually indicates transitives, cf. Ojibwe pimipattoon 'run' and aapacittoon 'use it', both with -ttoo- (-n is just the 2nd sg. imperative suffix). Conversely, pseudo-transitive verbs lack any common transitive morpheme, cf. Ojibwe miicin 'eat it' and wiissinin 'eat'. It would be like calling Dakota nazhiN 'stand' pseudo-intransitive because na- 'by foot' is in so many transitive verbs, and calling uN 'use' pseudo-transitive because it lacks an instrumental prefix. Why don't Siouanists do this? Maybe because it's not a very useful concept? But maybe some other Algonquianist can make a better pseudo-defense. Paul From shanwest at uvic.ca Wed Oct 2 18:20:16 2002 From: shanwest at uvic.ca (Shannon West) Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 11:20:16 -0700 Subject: Fw: Error Condition Re: Re: transitivity, etc, In-Reply-To: Message-ID: RE: Fw: Error Condition Re: Re: transitivity, etc,For more on this see James McCloskey's article on subjects in Haegeman's 1999 Elements of Grammar. It is a good overview of all of the relevant arguments and decompositions. I'm not quite sure how to look at these types of double stative verbs, but we should be able to come up with something. --John Oh thanks so much! I'll look into that right away. Shannon -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Thu Oct 3 00:03:05 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 18:03:05 -0600 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? In-Reply-To: <3D9A3B9C.A400FFD7@ucla.edu> Message-ID: On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, Pamela Munro wrote: > You're not hallucinating, John. Muskogean languages certainly have "a > class of experiencer verbs", by which I assume you might mean dative > subject verbs (if people will allow me that phrasing). I've been trying to avoid that in the Siouan context because (in OP, anyway) there are two forms of experiencer subject verbs, ones that use the simple stative series of pronominals, like dhiNge 'to lack' (aNdhiNge, dhidhiNge, dhiNge), and ones that are formed on dative stems and use the dativized patient series, like git?e 'one's own to die' (iNt?e, dhit?e, git?e). > So we have, like Siouan, a typical "active" system with (as I call them) > > -- class I subject intransitive verbs (similar to e.g. Lakhota wa- 'I'), > primarily active; > -- class II subject intransitive verbs (similar to e.g. Lakhota ma- > 'I'), primarily non-active; > -- class I subject, class II object transitive verbs. > > We also have class III "datives", which can be either objects or > subjects. As objects, they can be the only object (with verbs like > Chickasaw i-hollo 'love' [I am writing nasal vowels as underlined; if > this does not come across in your email let me know and I can send > this to you another way], No trace of underlining for me. I assume this is iNhollo, then? > which takes a I subject, III object [with the dative prefix im-]) or > can be a second object added to an ordinary transitive, as with > im-pilachi 'send to'. As subjects, they are typically intransitive > (e.g. in-takho'bi 'be lazy'). Thus it seems that there are both I, II transitives and I, III transitives, as also in Mississippi Valley Siouan, where the latter are like transitive dative stems (and datives stems are usually transitive, of course). Cf. naN?aN' 'hear' (anaN'?aN 'I hear it', aNnaN'?aN 'he hears me', ...) gi'naN?aN 'hear for' (e'naN?aN 'I hear his', iN'naN?aN 'he hears mine', ...) > However, we also have occasional transitive II and III subject verbs, > such as banna 'want' (II subject) and im-alhkaniya 'forget' (III > subject). These, like the 'lack' verbs that have been the subject of > recent discussion, take a subject that may be non-third person, but must > have a third person object: ... (exx.) And git?e' is an example of a III subject verb. Of course, it's a bit of a stretch, though not an unnatural one, to speak of I vs. II vs. III in a Siouan context, since it's more like Pronouns {I, II} x Stems {non-dative, dative}, where I is agent and II patient. While it's true that "dative" involves raising a less direct object to character of concord-governing primary object, an effect on the interpretation of the II (patient) pronominal, the morphophonemic effect on the vowels of the verb having a dative marker in the mix applies to both the I and II pronouns. There are really four series of pronominals I, II, I-in-the-presence-of-dative, and II-in-the-presence-of-dative. In OP some dative forms don't even use the modified series - the effect of the dative marker can be absorbed by the locative or just not occur. > ... There are numerous other syntactic subject tests, too, [apart from > case marking of NPs] all of which agree on what the subject is here.) I wonder if any of these would apply in Assiniboine for Shannon? Is there a reference one could consult? > Further: In Chickasaw only one object can agree. So 'send to' for > example cannot have a non-third person patient, even though the simple > transitive pilachi 'send' can. (In some languages, such as Choctaw, this > is not the case, and you can get three agreeing arguments on a verb.) > Moreover, some Choctaw speakers allow a non-third person patient for > 'want', so you can have two II markers on the same verb. No Chickasaw > speaker I've worked with allows this, though. This variety of treatments of secondary objects sounds like it might be relevant in the Siouan context, too, since things seem to be different in Dakotan and Dhegiha and maybe even in Omaha-Ponca vs. Osage and Kaw. JEK From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Thu Oct 3 00:19:16 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 18:19:16 -0600 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? In-Reply-To: <3D9AFAB0.4FECC536@westman.wave.ca> Message-ID: On Wed, 2 Oct 2002 voorhis at westman.wave.ca wrote: > Of course, modern Algonquian languages cannot reproduce the stative vs. > active contrast of Siouan and Muskogean because they mostly use the same > pronominal affixes for both subject and object, sorting out the > reference with the so-called theme signs, though the latter must have > been object pronouns originally. I've seen similar analyses of the IE theme vowel in verbs, comparing thematic paradigms to the definite object paradigms in some Uralic languages. > My take on the pseudo-intransitives is that they are just intransitive > verbs that seem to contain a morpheme that usually indicates > transitives, cf. Ojibwe pimipattoon 'run' and aapacittoon 'use it', > both with -ttoo- (-n is just the 2nd sg. imperative suffix). > Conversely, pseudo-transitive verbs lack any common transitive > morpheme, cf. Ojibwe miicin 'eat it' and wiissinin 'eat'. I take it that there are actually *both* pseudo-intransitives and pseudo-transitives in Algonquain languages? Do pseudo-transitives, which seem to be the relevant class involve a non-concordial argument (or maybe the term here is complement)? Was the 'seek help from' verb (I deleted the example in editing this down) a pseudo-transitive, so-called, or that something different? Actually, I'm sort of casting about for a better term than "experiencer (subject) verb." I've already explained why "dative subject" doesn't appeal to me. I'd also like something that doesn't presume the subject issue, or, at least, address it, since that introduces a number of possibly irrelevant assumptions. There are at least four morphological classes of these verbs to handle in Siouan contexts, to wit, verbs like dhiNge that are always "like that," but aren't dative, verbs like git?e that are always like that, and are dative, verbs that stative but can also act like that, and, as I recall from previous discussions, verbs that are probably always like that and involve a locative. JEK From munro at ucla.edu Thu Oct 3 01:30:48 2002 From: munro at ucla.edu (Pamela Munro) Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 18:30:48 -0700 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? Message-ID: John K. is correct about Chickasaw 'love', where my underlinings may not have transmitted to all of you: it is iN-hollo, where iN- is a nasalized vowel (the pre-fricative allomorph of dative im-). I'm very interested indeed by these thoughts about the Siouan "III" series. I had not thought about this this way, and it's interesting. If anyone wants to see a discussion of the syntactic tests for subjecthood (for those of us who care about subjecthood....) in Chickasaw, the clearest recent description is in my paper in the Payne-Barshi External Possession volume. I'm afraid none of these are likely to work exactly as I describe for any Siouan language I'm familiar with. They include -- nominative case marking (there are wrinkles involving this, as people familiar with Muskogean will understand) -- triggering the use of the third-person plural hoo- prefix [in my experience, the use of -pi in e.g. Lakhota cannot be simply described with regard to subjects] -- triggering switch-reference [although there are switch-referency facts in Siouan I don't think the situation is as clear as in Muskogean, though I'd be delighted to be proven wrong here] -- triggering the use of the diminutive verb suffix -a/o'si [this is strictly related to featues of the subject of the suffixed verb, in contrast, in my experience, with e.g. Lakhota -la, which does not seem clearly subject-related] When I was looking at this more seriously in Lakhota, I worked hard on trying to find subject properties in terms of complementation and auxiliary usage, without full success. Good luck with this, though! Pam -- Pamela Munro Professor, Department of Linguistics, UCLA UCLA Box 951543 Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543 USA http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/linguistics/people/munro/munro.htm From napshawin at hotmail.com Thu Oct 3 13:55:32 2002 From: napshawin at hotmail.com (Violet catches) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 08:55:32 -0500 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? Message-ID: John Could someone put me in contact with a linguist who is studying Algonqian languages or to be specific, Michif spoken on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. I have a hard time getting materials from t hat language. philamayaya pi xce! Violet _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Thu Oct 3 16:22:05 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 10:22:05 -0600 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? In-Reply-To: <3D9B9DC8.DEFC46CE@ucla.edu> Message-ID: On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, Pamela Munro wrote: > I'm very interested indeed by these thoughts about the Siouan "III" > series. I had not thought about this this way, and it's interesting. The three-way contrast of pronominals presumably works for Muskogean because the marking of dative is wholely confined to the object pronominal. I seem to recall that it has something to do with the nasal, but it has been a while since I read anything relevant. If the marking can be fairly transparently factored off and the remaining pronominal element matches the II series, then maybe the III series is still somewhat notional. But I don't recall if this works. In OP, dative marking affects the wa-locative-pronominal string in idiosyncratic ways, depending on the locative (or absence thereof), but, in the absence of a locative, it affects both pronominals (agent and patient, or I and II). So, while I tended to think in terms of agent, patient, and dative pronominals initially, I ended up resolving not to, feeling that in the OP case that approach obscured matters mroe than it helped them. The situation in Dakotan is materially simpler, but complicated in a different way (from my point of view) by the apparent swapping of the dative and suus paradigms (relative to Dhegiha). Still, I think it makes more sense there, too, to think in terms of dative as separate from the pronominals, though I'd have to review matters to be sure! From munro at ucla.edu Thu Oct 3 17:41:26 2002 From: munro at ucla.edu (Pamela Munro) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 10:41:26 -0700 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? Message-ID: Hi, John and Siouanists, I hope we aren't getting to parochially Muskogean here.... It's debatable how completely segmentable the dative element is from the "III" paradigm, for two reasons (A and B below; consider also C). A. In all but first person singular, the forms are purely "II" class + dative im- (with the nasal assimilating to a following stop and coalescing with the preceding vowel before a fricative). All the II prefixes end with a vowel, but it is completely regular for an i to delete following a vowel in this environment. The problem is first person singular. The II prefix is sa-; the III + dative prefix is am- (i.e. a- + im-), not sam- (sa- + im-). Immediately this looks as though we have a different series here, which is the same in all persons but 1sg. The situation is a bit more complicated in a few languages, such as Chickasaw, which provide evidence that 1sg III am- really should be seen as underlying /sam-/ at some level: after certain preceding prefixes (I class 2sg. ish-, I class 2pl hash-, or "hypothetical" ik-) the 1sg III + dative prefix is sam-: Am-pilachi. 'He sends it to me' 1sIII.dat-send Ik-sam-pila'ch-o. 'He doesn't send it to me' hyp-1sIII.dat-send-neg Is-sam-pilachi. 'You send it to me' 2sI-1sIII.dat-send (just like 1sII sa-, 1sIII.dat sam- triggers a change of 2sI ish- to is-) So we might like to say this really was the 1sII prefix sa- and that the initial s- just drops in initial position for some reason. However, this would have to be a truly ad hoc rule: there is no other invironment in which initial s- drops. (In particular, initial s- never drops from the 1sII prefix, though see C below.) B. Another difference between the II class prefixes and the III+dative prefixes is positional/morphophonological. To me these arguments seem fairly clearly to show that the prefixes that appear with the dative cannot be synchronically the same as the II prefixes. (Some of this argumentation may appear in Charles Ulrich's dissertation on Choctaw.) i. In Chickasaw (I won't try here to review the complex facts for other languages) the III+dative prefixes precede the segmentable a- at the beginning of verbs; the II prefixes follow this a- (which below I will gloss simply as a; complex issue): Am-a-pila. 'He helps her for me' 1sIII.dat-a-help A-sa-pila. 'He helps me' a-1sII-help ii. The III+dative is phonologically a clitic, or at least is outside the domain of the rhythmic lengthening rule; the II prefix is within the domain of rhythmic lengthening. In these examples I'll put a # following lengthened vowels: Amapi#la. Asa#pila. cf. Api#la. 'He helps her' This rule (described extensively elsewhere) lengthens short nonfinal vowel in even numbered open syllables within a morphologically specified domain. C. Despite the fact that we don't see a- as a 1sg prefix except in the III+dative markers within the strict domain of agreement, there is one other environment where this appears -- fossilized vocatives of a few kinship terms, such as a-ppo'si' 'granny'. (Otherwise we'd expect II here, e.g. sa-ppo'si' 'my grandmother'.) All in all, I don't regard the "III" concept as "notional"! But not everyone would agree with me.... Pam Koontz John E wrote: > On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, Pamela Munro wrote: > > I'm very interested indeed by these thoughts about the Siouan "III" > > series. I had not thought about this this way, and it's interesting. > > The three-way contrast of pronominals presumably works for Muskogean > because the marking of dative is wholely confined to the object > pronominal. I seem to recall that it has something to do with the nasal, > but it has been a while since I read anything relevant. If the marking > can be fairly transparently factored off and the remaining pronominal > element matches the II series, then maybe the III series is still somewhat > notional. But I don't recall if this works. > > In OP, dative marking affects the wa-locative-pronominal string in > idiosyncratic ways, depending on the locative (or absence thereof), but, > in the absence of a locative, it affects both pronominals (agent and > patient, or I and II). So, while I tended to think in terms of agent, > patient, and dative pronominals initially, I ended up resolving not to, > feeling that in the OP case that approach obscured matters mroe than it > helped them. > > The situation in Dakotan is materially simpler, but complicated in a > different way (from my point of view) by the apparent swapping of the > dative and suus paradigms (relative to Dhegiha). Still, I think it makes > more sense there, too, to think in terms of dative as separate from the > pronominals, though I'd have to review matters to be sure! From munro at ucla.edu Thu Oct 3 17:59:15 2002 From: munro at ucla.edu (Pamela Munro) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 10:59:15 -0700 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? Message-ID: Oops, before anyone corrects me, of course there is another 1sg a- in Chickasaw: the 1sg "N" class prefix (which is formed with hypothetical ik-) is ak-. However, and I won't go into this here, this series definitely does not componentially include the II class prefixes in all persons. Pam From voorhis at westman.wave.ca Thu Oct 3 22:15:20 2002 From: voorhis at westman.wave.ca (voorhis at westman.wave.ca) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 17:15:20 -0500 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? Message-ID: Koontz John E wrote: > I take it that there are actually *both* pseudo-intransitives and > pseudo-transitives in Algonquain languages? Yes. > Do pseudo-transitives, which > seem to be the relevant class involve a non-concordial argument (or maybe > the term here is complement)? Yes, and that contrasts with the true transitive inanimate verbs which do have a suffix for inanimate object - that's in the view of those who believe in the pseudo-categories. You're making me defend an analysis here that I disagree with. I don't think what has been identified as the inan. obj. suffix is a morpheme at all. > Was the 'seek help from' verb (I deleted the example in editing this down) > a pseudo-transitive, so-called, or that something different? It is a pseudo-transitive, but of a subclass that admits objects of either gender. This class I do accept. > Actually, I'm sort of casting about for a better term than "experiencer > (subject) verb." I've already explained why "dative subject" doesn't > appeal to me. I'd also like something that doesn't presume the subject > issue, or, at least, address it, since that introduces a number of > possibly irrelevant assumptions. Someone has already said "double stative." > There are at least four morphological classes of these verbs to handle in > Siouan contexts, to wit, verbs like dhiNge that are always "like that," > but aren't dative, verbs like git?e that are always like that, and are > dative, verbs that stative but can also act like that, and, as I recall > from previous discussions, verbs that are probably always like that and > involve a locative. Double statives, dative double statives, optionally double statives and locative double statives? Try telling your students about *that* on the first day of linguistics class. Paul From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Oct 4 00:42:24 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 18:42:24 -0600 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? In-Reply-To: <3D9CC177.D6ADB74@westman.wave.ca> Message-ID: On Thu, 3 Oct 2002 voorhis at westman.wave.ca wrote: > > Actually, I'm sort of casting about for a better term than "experiencer > > (subject) verb." I've already explained why "dative subject" doesn't > > appeal to me. I'd also like something that doesn't presume the subject > > issue, or, at least, address it, since that introduces a number of > > possibly irrelevant assumptions. > > Someone has already said "double stative." That works for some sorts of examples in Dakotan, but doesn't seem applicable to OP dhiNge (Da niNc^a) at all. It's more like stative + nonconcordial third person. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Oct 4 00:57:02 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 18:57:02 -0600 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? In-Reply-To: <3D9C8145.7CA50DBB@ucla.edu> Message-ID: On Thu, 3 Oct 2002, Pamela Munro wrote: > I hope we aren't getting to parochially Muskogean here.... No problem for me. I think the sorts of considerations applied are potentially parallel enough to be relevant. Incidentally, there isn't a Muskogean list, is there? > C. Despite the fact that we don't see a- as a 1sg prefix except in the > III+dative markers within the strict domain of agreement, there is one other > environment where this appears -- fossilized vocatives of a few kinship > terms, such as a-ppo'si' 'granny'. (Otherwise we'd expect II here, e.g. > sa-ppo'si' 'my grandmother'.) For what it's worth, in Omaha-Ponca, and to an extent I don't recall precisely in other Dhegiha languages, a couple of kinship terms seem to have the dative version of Pat1 for the first person possessive: iNdadi 'my father' stem -dadi dhiadi 'your father' stem -adi idhadi 'his father' stem -adi dadi=ha(u) 'o father' stem -dadi Compare 'mothere's brother' with the usual possessives: winegi 'my mo bro' stem -negi dhinegi 'your mo bro' inegi 'his mo bro' negi=hau(u) 'o mo bro' 'Mother' works somewhat like 'father', including the suppletion. A possible fossil of this is iNs^?age 'elder (male)'. From jbmart at wm.edu Fri Oct 4 02:22:58 2002 From: jbmart at wm.edu (jbmart at wm.edu) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 22:22:58 -0400 Subject: Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hello, everyone, Just a note to let you know another Muskogeanist is lurking. There's not a Muskogean list so far as I know, but it sounds like a fine idea. I'll listen in on this one for a while to see what it's like... Jack Martin College of William and Mary From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Oct 4 06:25:07 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 00:25:07 -0600 Subject: More on Experiencer Subjects and/or Pseudo-Transitives (?) Message-ID: Rankin's quesitonaire on case alignment from the archives of the list: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9902&L=siouan&D=0&P=73 Rankin's list of stative verbs with active meanings in Kaw from the archives of the list: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9903&L=siouan&P=70 Osage verbs of enjoyment and subjects from the archives: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9904&L=siouan&P=R2435&D=0 Forms with experiencer subjects in Omaha-Ponca in the archives of the list: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9902&L=siouan&P=R258 Omaha-Ponca comparisons with Rankin's statives with active meaning from the archives: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9903&L=siouan&P=R484 There is a set of examples of Omaha-Ponca git?e and t?e in the archives of the list at: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0005&L=siouan&P=R620. John E. Koontz http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Oct 4 06:58:06 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 00:58:06 -0600 Subject: Dakota ni(N)c^a Message-ID: I had proposed earlier to look at 'lack' verbs in other Mississippi Valley languages: Dakota (wa)niN'c^a Ingham gives 'hace, not; lack, have missing' wanic^a vn (neuter verb, i.e., stative), first person wama'nica or mawa'nica. ex. isto saNni wanica 'he had one arm missing'; ...; nuNge mawanice 'I have no ears, am disobedient, obstinate' I'm not aware that he lists a form without wa- and under 'lack, miss, be short of' he gives naokpani va and yuchaN vn. Buechel lists ni'ca 'be destitute of, have none of', first person manica. He lists wanica 'none', but gives manica as the first person. IO n(~)iNn(~)e ~ n(~)iNe 'there is/are no, none, nothing, be without' The sequence *VNke comes out VNn~e in Ioway (?) and VNr in Otoe (?). The is eng, and n is regularly n~ (enye) before i or e or iN. Wi his^jara' niNiNk 'to be blind' Lit. 'to lack eyes'. The inflection is his^jara hiNniNk 'I ...', with the first person patient hiN-. Also, nuNuNg^niN'k, nuNuNg^ra'niNk 'be deaf', lit. 'to lack earholes', cf. Dakota 'disobedient'. First person nuNuNriniNk with i(N) first person patient after a vowel: -ra + iN => i(N), (N) unnoticed before n. I believe these idioms may be the only attestations of the form in Winnebago. John E. Koontz http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz From rankin at ku.edu Fri Oct 4 14:59:04 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 09:59:04 -0500 Subject: Siouan 'not be', 'lack', 'be/have none' Message-ID: > > Someone has already said "double stative." I think that's what most Siouanists have been using -- or maybe that's just my impression because that's what I used in that Siouan Conference paper. Since I'm doing something similar for SSILA in Jan., I'm enjoying the discussion and will find it helpful in my current revision. > That works for some sorts of examples in Dakotan, but doesn't seem > applicable to OP dhiNge (Da niNc^a) at all. It's more like stative + > nonconcordial third person. A number of languages have these 'not to be', 'to be/have nothing', 'to lack', etc. verbs, but Siouan nica, ninge, etc. are especially good examples; the only way they could be better is if there were 3rd sg. pronominals. I think some of the problem lies in our translations of this verb. The translation governs whether you get an English "nominative", "accusative" or "dative" subject pronoun -- all 3 may be possible. I wish I knew how real speakers of Siouan languages "think about" this verb -- but, then, I guess it's the linguist's job to figure that out, isn't it? Bob From rood at spot.Colorado.EDU Fri Oct 4 18:44:10 2002 From: rood at spot.Colorado.EDU (ROOD DAVID S) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 12:44:10 -0600 Subject: Dakota ni(N)c^a In-Reply-To: Message-ID: John, Both ni'c^a and wani'ca exist; until you cited Ingham, I had never heard of wani'ca being conjugated -- it's always meant something like 'there isn't any' in the contexts where I've heard it. The sterotypical sentence with ni^ca is "ma'zaska mani'ce" 'I don't have any money'. At some point I remember learning that one of these was preferred for things that are normally expected to exist to be missing, such as body parts or those kin that everyone has, like mothers and fathers, while the other was used for less expected stuff like food or cars or those kin terms that not everyone has, like older or younger siblings -- but I can't find written confirmation of that even though I've just looked, and I can't be sure which is which. David S. Rood Dept. of Linguistics Univ. of Colorado 295 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0295 USA rood at colorado.edu On Fri, 4 Oct 2002, Koontz John E wrote: > I had proposed earlier to look at 'lack' verbs in other Mississippi Valley > languages: > > Dakota (wa)niN'c^a > > Ingham gives 'hace, not; lack, have missing' wanic^a vn (neuter verb, > i.e., stative), first person wama'nica or mawa'nica. ex. isto saNni wanica > 'he had one arm missing'; ...; nuNge mawanice 'I have no ears, am > disobedient, obstinate' > > I'm not aware that he lists a form without wa- and under 'lack, miss, be > short of' he gives naokpani va and yuchaN vn. > > Buechel lists ni'ca 'be destitute of, have none of', first person manica. > He lists wanica 'none', but gives manica as the first person. > > IO n(~)iNn(~)e ~ n(~)iNe 'there is/are no, none, nothing, be without' > The sequence *VNke comes out VNn~e in Ioway (?) and VNr in Otoe (?). > The is eng, and n is regularly n~ (enye) before i or e or iN. > > Wi his^jara' niNiNk 'to be blind' Lit. 'to lack eyes'. The inflection is > his^jara hiNniNk 'I ...', with the first person patient hiN-. > > Also, nuNuNg^niN'k, nuNuNg^ra'niNk 'be deaf', lit. 'to lack earholes', cf. > Dakota 'disobedient'. First person nuNuNriniNk with i(N) first person > patient after a vowel: -ra + iN => i(N), (N) unnoticed before n. > > I believe these idioms may be the only attestations of the form in > Winnebago. > > John E. Koontz > http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz > From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Oct 4 20:03:49 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 14:03:49 -0600 Subject: Dakota ni(N)c^a In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 4 Oct 2002, ROOD DAVID S wrote: > ... The sterotypical sentence with ni^ca is "ma'zaska mani'ce" 'I > don't have any money'. I'm pretty sure that maNzeska aNdhiNge would work in OP, too. > At some point I remember learning that one of these was preferred > for things that are normally expected to exist to be missing, such as body > parts or those kin that everyone has, like mothers and fathers, while the > other was used for less expected stuff like food or cars or those kin > terms that not everyone has, like older or younger siblings -- but I can't > find written confirmation of that even though I've just looked, and I > can't be sure which is which. ... but, I have the impression from my quick look last night, and from your comment, that OP use of dhiNge is much freer and less restricted lexically than use in at least Dakotan and Winnebago. JEK From rankin at ku.edu Fri Oct 4 20:35:58 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 15:35:58 -0500 Subject: Fw: a literary investigation of Lakota plant names Message-ID: I received this excerpt on Lakota ethnobotany from a KU student of Kelly Kindscher, the author of a couple of nice books on Indian use of plants for food and medicine, etc. He asked for comment. I don't know that I have a whole lot to say about it, but I told him I'd ask the list. Those of you with an interest in Lakota (or other Siouan) ethnobotany and plant terminology may be interested in reading the attachment and/or contacting Bob Prue. Bob Rankin ----- Original Message ----- From: Bob Eagleman Prue To: Cc: Kelly Kindscher Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 9:11 AM Subject: a literary investigation of Lakota plant names > Dr. Rankin, Kelly Kindscher suggested that I send a couple pages of a > couple of pages of a paper I did for him over the summer for your feedback > and comment. I would appreciate it if you have the time > > thanks > > Bob Prue > > > > >X-Originating-IP: [129.237.35.95] > >From: "Kindscher, Kelly" > >To: "'Bob Eagleman Prue'" > >Subject: your paper > >Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2002 15:33:16 -0500 > >X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2653.19) > > > >Bob, > > I just finished giving your paper a closer look. I really like it. I did > >not edit it, but thought about how to make it stronger. I would consider > >shortening it, before submitting it for publication. I would consider > >reducing the part about where plant medicines come from as others have > >discussed that and you are not adding a lot of new material. > > I also think you should consider discussing the latter part about the > >Lakota plant names with someone in the Linguistics Dept., so that they could > >give you some feedback on your ideas. I would contact Bob Rankin (tell him > >I sent you) and ask if he could help or who he would suggest. I would him > >the paper, but tell him you just want him to read pages 13-14 so that you > >could get some feedback. > > After that, I would encourage you to have one other person read it who has > >some knowledge on the topic, and then one person to copy edit it, then send > >it out for publication. > >Kelly > >P.S. See you tomorrow. > > There are many ways to contact me: > sicangu at swbell.net > bobprue at ku.edu > 816-531-3655 > 3642 Charlotte St. > Kansas City, MO 64109 > > http://home.swbell.net/sicangu > > ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------- > -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: A LITERARY INVESTIGATION OF LAKOTA PLANT NAMES.doc Type: application/msword Size: 28160 bytes Desc: not available URL: From rankin at ku.edu Sat Oct 5 21:26:47 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 16:26:47 -0500 Subject: More on "Experiencer Subjects" Message-ID: I am probably responsible for some of the confusion in recent correspondence on this topic. I have not been careful with my wording, I'm afraid, and have used the term "experiencer subject". I should probably simply omitted the reference to "subject". I feel we are dealing with semantic roles (semantic case, 'deep' case, theta roles, whatever), of which "experiencer" is certainly one, and I should not have coupled it with "subject", which is a grammatical relation, not a semantic role. If this has created misunderstandings, I'm sorry. Obviously these matters are going to have to be dealt with by any linguist working with a typical Siouan language, but different models of grammar treat them differently. Those of you in the throes of thesis-writing have mentioned having to stick to particular orthodoxies. Let me play devil's advocate and point out that the dissertations that have had the greatest impact have not been the ones that simply treated a language within a particular model. Rather they have been the dissertations that used data from particular languages to CHALLENGE the model(s). George Lakoff's comes to mind most readily, but there have been others. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to get anyone into trouble, and these are perhaps questions best taken up with ones advisors. Bob ----- Original Message ----- From: Koontz John E To: Siouan List Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 1:25 AM Subject: More on Experiencer Subjects and/or Pseudo-Transitives (?) > Rankin's quesitonaire on case alignment from the archives of the list: > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9902& L=siouan&D=0&P=73 > > Rankin's list of stative verbs with active meanings in Kaw from the > archives of the list: > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9903& L=siouan&P=70 > > Osage verbs of enjoyment and subjects from the archives: > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9904& L=siouan&P=R2435&D=0 > > Forms with experiencer subjects in Omaha-Ponca in the archives of the > list: > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9902& L=siouan&P=R258 > > Omaha-Ponca comparisons with Rankin's statives with active meaning from > the archives: > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9903& L=siouan&P=R484 > > There is a set of examples of Omaha-Ponca git?e and t?e in the archives of > the list at: > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0005& L=siouan&P=R620. > > John E. Koontz > http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz > From rankin at ku.edu Tue Oct 8 15:22:46 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2002 10:22:46 -0500 Subject: Job announcement Message-ID: Dear friends, Here is the official job announcement from the University of Kansas for a phonologist. Please feel free to circulate it to anyone you believe might be interested and qualified. Thanks. Best, Bob ****************************** Assistant Professor Department of Linguistics Position Announcement The Department of Linguistics at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, anticipates making a tenure-track faculty appointment at the rank of Assistant Professor beginning August 18, 2003. The position is contingent upon budgetary approval. DUTIES: .Teach two courses per semester, including LING 312/712 "Phonology I", LING 714 "Phonology II", seminar in phonology, and additional courses as appropriate to the candidate's qualifications; develop syllabi; prepare lectures; develop, administer, and grade exams. Hold regular office hours. .Carry out research within area of specialization. .Work with graduate and undergraduate student committees (thesis and dissertation) as appropriate; advise graduate and undergraduate students as appropriate. .Participate in Department, College and University committees. .Participate in Linguistics Department functions, such as the Linguistics Colloquy. REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS: Ph.D. in Linguistics with a specialization in phonology Strong record of research in phonology PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS Evidence of teaching experience APPLICATION PROCEDURES: A complete Application will include a letter of application, curriculum vitae, sample publications, and three letters of reference. Please include phone number and e-mail address. Send to: Linguistics Search Committee Department of Linguistics University of Kansas 1541 Lilac Lane Lawrence, KS 66044-3177 First priority will be given to applications received by December 1, 2002. The University of Kansas is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer; The University encourages applications from underrepresented group members. Federal and state legislation prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, age, disability, and veteran status. In addition, University policies prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, marital status, and parental status. From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Sat Oct 12 12:52:52 2002 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael Mccafferty) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2002 07:52:52 -0500 Subject: George Catlin In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Anyone in the Washington D.C. area or anyone planning on being there soon might enjoy "George Catlin and His Indian Gallery," at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian. The NY Times reported yesterday that the exhibit contains "all" of his paintings of native Americans. Michael McCafferty 307 Memorial Hall Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana 47405 mmccaffe at indiana.edu From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Sat Oct 12 20:11:07 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2002 14:11:07 -0600 Subject: Interesting Constituency Example Message-ID: I encountered this example in the Dorsey OP texts: JOD 90:117.18-19 "e=da'=daN wanitta ttaNbe=kki, what(ever) (particular) animal I see when it?e'=adhe= kki=z^i, I kill it with it when bdhathe= hnaN= maN a'=daN abdhiN" a'=bi=ama I eat it HABIT I do therefore I have it he said He said, "I have it because whenever I see an animal, then I kill it with this and eat it." The context is that the speaker has been asked why he carries a gun, a device unfamiliar to the asker. What I noticed first was that the applicative i- is, in effect, outside the infixing (incorporating) causative construction t?e=dhe 'kill' ('cause to die'). The constituency of it?e=...dhe is i-[t?e=...dhe]. I thought this was a nice example in serveral ways. For one thing, it shows layering or hierarchy in word morphology. For another it shows that inflection doesn't necessarily always occur at the highest level, though there may be forms that do extract inflection. Other examples: u'-mu=s^te 'to be left from shooting' (u'- cf. Dakota wo'-) u-mu'=xpadhe 'make fall (at a place) by shooting' I also believe it would be correct to say that the habitual or exclusive enclitic s^naN ~ hnaN ~ naN applies to the whole structure before it, not just to the last verb, i.e., habitually (see + kill + eat), or maybe see + habitually (kill + eat), but not not see + kill + habitually (eat). Note also that the a'=daN conjunction clearly applies to the whole aggregation. Probably most of those reading this last will have a reaction like "Well, duh!" but I think there may be some merit in pointing out that clause boundaries can occur in mid word. This is something that Randy deals with in his Crow grammar. Something else of interest about this example is the use of the 'when' form =kki-z^i in which =z^i ia clearly not the negative, or, at leat, does not have negative force here. From the context, perhaps it means "only when, in the case that." From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Sat Oct 12 20:50:20 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2002 14:50:20 -0600 Subject: Interesting Constituency Example In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 12 Oct 2002, Koontz John E wrote: > What I noticed first was that the applicative i- is, in effect, outside > the infixing (incorporating) causative construction t?e=dhe 'kill' ('cause > to die'). The constituency of it?e=...dhe is i-[t?e=...dhe]. Or maybe not. I've now also noticed it?e' 'to die of'. I think the nested structure is correct, because of the general use of i- as the instrumental applicative, but it would be hard to argue against it?e'. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Sat Oct 12 21:13:07 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2002 15:13:07 -0600 Subject: Dakota itazipA 'bow' Message-ID: We were speculating on the meaning of the -zipA component of the Dakota 'bow' word a while back. I think we noticed zi'pe=la 'thin, fine'. How about this, though? OP mu[u]'=zibe 'to shoot', Dorsey 90:189.9. Mu= is, of course, the shooting instrumental. This stem occurs exactly once in the texts. From rankin at ku.edu Sun Oct 13 14:50:52 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 09:50:52 -0500 Subject: Interesting Constituency Example Message-ID: I think we (read: John) are just getting to the point in Siouan grammars where we can begin to see the implications of these really interesting syntactic constructions. They even manage to get me interested in syntax, and that's saying something. > Something else of interest about this example is the use of the 'when' > form =kki-z^i in which =z^i ia clearly not the negative, or, at leat, does > not have negative force here. From the context, perhaps it means "only > when, in the case that." I guess it isn't uncommon for negatives to participate in this sort of 'irrealis' usage, cf. French sentences like Je crains qu'il ne vienne. 'I'm afraid lest s/he come'. I fear that'he NEG come(subjunct.) Bob From rankin at ku.edu Sun Oct 13 14:56:54 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 09:56:54 -0500 Subject: Dakota itazipA 'bow' Message-ID: > We were speculating on the meaning of the -zipA component of the Dakota > 'bow' word a while back. I think we noticed zi'pe=la 'thin, fine'. > How about this, though? OP mu[u]'=zibe 'to shoot', Dorsey 90:189.9. Mu= > is, of course, the shooting instrumental. This stem occurs exactly once > in the texts. I bet that's it. The only other possibility is that zibe is a borrowing from Dakotan -- a folk etymology based on itazipela. Maybe Kathy, Ardis or Catherine can check for it in other contexts. Quapaw, Kaw and Osage are all gone now. Chiwere is a possibility for related forms. Bob From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Sun Oct 13 16:54:49 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 10:54:49 -0600 Subject: Dakota itazipA 'bow' (loans and speculations) In-Reply-To: <002201c272c8$c61b51a0$e2b5ed81@computer> Message-ID: On Sun, 13 Oct 2002, R. Rankin wrote: > > We were speculating on the meaning of the -zipA component of the > > Dakota 'bow' word a while back. > The only other possibility is that zibe is a borrowing from Dakotan -- > a folk etymology based on itazipela. That latter is always a possibility, and think one that students of Siouan have tended to overlook in the past, for several reasons. I certainly find I seldom worry about it myself! For one thing, it's a simplifying assumption, if a somewhat naive one. There's a certain tendency to think as if "whitemen" encountered the Omaha in 16-something and shortly after that the Omaha got into regular communication with the Dakota groups, too, ... For another, there's a feeling - not unsupported by the available data - that loans in Siouan languages are comparatively few. Of course, loans between Siouan languages can be difficult to identify, given the similarities in phonologies and morphosyntax, and a apparent tendency to adapt phonologies in borrowings. I'm thinking of the way that ethnonyms and place names often look like cognates, though, presumably, they must have been borrowed. Or maybe not, if we allow the concept of phonological adaptation, then loans can be difficult to distinguish from calques and inheritences. If you start with an analyzable form in one language and translate it into cognate morphemes of the same meaning arranged in the same morphosyntax, you get about the same thing you would get if you inherited the form or borrowed the form intact, adapting it by the usual "correspondences" to your own phonology. There might well be differences, but they would be subtle. I wonder to what extent the often regular similarities of ethnonyms across the Siouan-speaking regions fuels the logic of recorded native speculation on ethnic origins, which take the approach that when one traces back the various Dhegiha (or Mississippi Valley, etc.) groups one finds not an as yet undiverged proto-entity, but a micro-cosm of the later (present) situation, in which all of the later groups exist, but in a harmonious community of the whole. On the other hand, that might as easily come out of things like lineal kinship systems, clan structure, and the familiar mechanics of village division. The linguistics of the situation are perhaps less likely to be causal than mutually consistent. From rankin at ku.edu Sun Oct 13 18:23:51 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 13:23:51 -0500 Subject: Dakota zipA cognates. Message-ID: I've changed my mind on the possible loanword status of Omaha -zibe. It turns out that there are quite a few related forms that tend to confirm it as a native (probably pan-) Siouan root. It's useful to look under z^ as well as z, as there are clearly related forms. Quapaw: di-zi'we 'pinch' (di- 'by hand, pulling') Dakotan: yu-z^ipa 'pinch' pa-z^ipa 'make penetrate, sting, stick w/ pin' Biloxi: sipsipi' 'pitted' Those forms are probably all cognate via fricative symbolism. There are one or two other roots with the same form(s) that are probably just homophones. They are exemplified in various dictionaries. One is to make a certain kind of noise. Quapaw: z^iz^i'we 'mutter' ziwe' 'cry out, scream' na-z^i'we 'flush out w/ the feet' Dakota had a somewhat similar term, but I forgot to write it down. Another is 'smooth, soft, mushy' Dakota: kaz^i'pa 'shave, plane smooth or flat' Cf. 'pancake' also. Winnebago: boozi'p 'mash by shooting' plus numerous other 'soft and squishy, smooth' terms. In any event, there seems to be quite a bit of evidence for John's analysis of the -zipa in 'bow' as the 'penetrate, stick a hole in' root. Bob From BARudes at aol.com Sun Oct 13 18:52:32 2002 From: BARudes at aol.com (BARudes at aol.com) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 14:52:32 EDT Subject: Dakota zipA cognates. Message-ID: You can probably push the root back to Proto-Siouan-Catawban. Catawba has the verb root sipni- 'sting' as in sipn'ihire: 'it (bee) stung it (him, her)'. Blair From lcumberl at indiana.edu Mon Oct 14 01:53:53 2002 From: lcumberl at indiana.edu (Linda A Cumberland) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 20:53:53 -0500 Subject: Dakota zipA cognates. In-Reply-To: <139.15ea1bc2.2adb1af0@aol.com> Message-ID: I've been trying to compile a list of Assiniboine verb roots over the past few weeks and I was coming to the conclusion that -zip/z^ip (based just on Assiniboine words) has to do with cutting with something sharp and/or poking gently. There's a lot of overlap between zip and z^ip. As for 'erect, as a tent' I imagine the process of poking tent poles up under the tent material to stand it up (or is this my own personal folk etymology?) and 'broadcloth' perhaps having to do with the fabrication process (ditto, last parenthetical statement). And 'bow', well, the purpose of a bow certainly is to poke something *and* cutting (at least piercing) with something sharp. Here's a selection from my list, with a couple of Doug's thrown in: iNkazipa ~ iNkaz^ipa 'a plane, for smoothing wood' iNpazipa ~ iNpaz^ipa 'a plane, for smoothing wood' iNtazipa 'bow' ozipa 'to erect, as a tent' zipena 'thin' zizipena ~ zipzipena 'broadcloth' naz^ipa 'to pinch by stepping on' paz^ipa 'to poke (the example I was given was "like getting a stick to poke an animal on the road to see if it's dead") caNkaz^ipa 'to shave wood, to whittle' yaz^ipa 'to nip lightly with the teeth' and my personal favorite: iNkpaz^ipa 'to make the sign of the cross, to cross oneself' (Doug's informant specified that this involved poking oneself') Another interesting one from Doug's Ft. Belknap consultant is: osni wiNchaz^iz^ipena 'to be a biting cold, a sharp cold, as on a clear winter day' Linda On Sun, 13 Oct 2002 BARudes at aol.com wrote: > You can probably push the root back to Proto-Siouan-Catawban. Catawba has > the verb root sipni- 'sting' as in sipn'ihire: 'it (bee) stung it (him, her)'. > > Blair > > > From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Oct 14 04:03:35 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 22:03:35 -0600 Subject: Dakota zipA cognates. In-Reply-To: <001301c272e5$af2f8700$d1b5ed81@computer> Message-ID: On Sun, 13 Oct 2002, R. Rankin wrote: > I've changed my mind on the possible loanword status of > Omaha -zibe. It turns out that there are quite a few > related forms that tend to confirm it as a native > (probably pan-) Siouan root. It's useful to look under > z^ as well as z, as there are clearly related forms. > > Quapaw: > di-zi'we 'pinch' (di- 'by hand, pulling') > > Dakotan: > yu-z^ipa 'pinch' > pa-z^ipa 'make penetrate, sting, stick w/ pin' > > Biloxi: > sipsipi' 'pitted' > > Those forms are probably all cognate via fricative > symbolism. > > There are one or two other roots with the same form(s) > that are probably just homophones. They are > exemplified in various dictionaries. > > One is to make a certain kind of noise. > > Quapaw: > z^iz^i'we 'mutter' > ziwe' 'cry out, scream' > na-z^i'we 'flush out w/ the feet' > Dakota had a somewhat similar term, but I forgot to > write it down. > > Another is 'smooth, soft, mushy' > > Dakota: > kaz^i'pa 'shave, plane smooth or flat' > Cf. 'pancake' also. > > Winnebago: > boozi'p 'mash by shooting' plus numerous other 'soft > and squishy, smooth' terms. > > In any event, there seems to be quite a bit of evidence > for John's analysis of the -zipa in 'bow' as the > 'penetrate, stick a hole in' root. > > Bob > > > From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Oct 14 05:07:27 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 23:07:27 -0600 Subject: Dakota itazipA 'bow' In-Reply-To: <002201c272c8$c61b51a0$e2b5ed81@computer> Message-ID: I got interrupted in this before everyone else went off and did their homework. So now, of course, it's something of an anti-climax! On Sun, 13 Oct 2002, R. Rankin wrote: > > How about this, though? OP mu[u]'=zibe 'to shoot', Dorsey > > 90:189.9. Mu= > is, of course, the shooting instrumental. This stem > > occurs exactly once in the texts. > I bet that's it. ... Maybe [we] can check for it in other contexts. Yesterday I quailed at the thought of this. It's always a challenge to look for other instances of instrumental roots in Siouan languages, thanks to the instrumentals themselves being prefixed and possibly hidden under datives, locatives, etc., prefixed to these. Fortunately there are only about five locatives (counting compounds) times four or five datives, etc. times ten instrumentals times about seven separately lexiconized Mississippi Valley languages ... This is a point at which the people working with Crow and Hidatsa and Mandan smile gently. There's also wa or not wa and, in fact, a not option for each of the above, if you're doing the math. One thing every good Siouan dictionary needs is a good root index. If it's computer-based, links would be nice ... I think this is not just a convenience for scholars, but a necessity for speakers, though we're plainly not clear on the extent to which any of this is productive, perhaps because it often depends on the form, and not always the constituent morphemes. A good alternative to this is a computer-based text with search tool that can handle pattern matching. Looking for words with the syllable mu is how I stumbled on mu[u]'=zibe, for example, but earlier I was looking for kkimu and wanted to find instances not initial and irregardless of accent, which was awkward. So, with regard to OP -zibe < PMV *-zip-: I thought I'd start with Winnebago, because Ken Miner does provide a root index. Since everyone leaped in with other stuff, I'll petty much leave it at that! boozip 'to mash by shooting, blowing, great force' (Da wo-) gizi'p 'to stir something soft' (Da ka-) honaNzi'p 'to smash st smeary with the feet' (similar forms with -ru- 'by hand' and -wa- 'by pushing') maNaNzi'p 'to smear with a knife' (Da wa-) razi'p 'to mouth st soft' (Da ya-) ruzi'p 'to get fingers in st soft or sticky' (Da yu-) wazi'p 'to knead' (Da pa-) woowa'zip (stative) 'to be lonesome' (wherein one experiences kneading) ziizi'p 'be watery' (perhaps better, 'be syrupy', see below) taaniN'z^u ('sugar') ziizip 'syrup' And, of course, you do have to worry about fricative ablaut or sound symbolism, which seem to effect a large percentage of instrumental roots, so ... maNaNz^i'p 'to whittle' (Da wa-) naNaNr~uz^ip 'to shave wood for kindling' ('wood' + 'to plane' below) ruz^i'p 'to plane' (Da yu-) woowa'z^ip 'wood shavings' (by pushing) (Da pa-) woomaN'z^ip 'wood shavings' (by cutting) No -ghip examples. The 'be mushy, watery' stem Bob suggests is not related, but one might want to think about wazi'p 'to knead'. That could certainly be a separate 'pinch' root -zip, but 'knead' seems to fit into the causality of making things softer, more mushy rather nicely, and it seems possible to me, given the 'pinch, sting' sense of cognates, that there could be a development from exerting a compressive force to working with a mushy, fluid substance. The z^-grade -z^i'p 'whittle, carve, plane, shave' seems eather different, and made me wonder to what extent bows are produced by whittling. I believe extensive whittling is involved, actually. If you think about the actions involved in whittling or shaving, they amount to taking a very shallow cut or nip or scallop out of something. The force exerted in more a matter of scraping than pinching, but pressure, if not compression is involved in any event, and the action of biting serves to unite the two figures. In any event, the same notions recur across MV with the same root or set of homophonous, sound symbolism-varying roots *Zip. I think capital S (and by extension Z) are the symbols used in such cases in the Comparative Siouan Dictionary manuscript. That is, in cases where a variety of sound symbolic grades or different grades are found, so that it is unclear what grade to reconstruct as original (if any). I believe that the semantic problems with this set or sets recur in the materials assembled for the CSD. There is a tendency to variability across and within languages in root semantics between manner or means and consequence, or between spatial figures in actions and sensual qualities of products. I won't try to assembles examples at this point, but this is fairly typical. Not all root sets exhibit this sort of problem, but it is not unique. JEK P.S. I looked pretty carefully manually for -c,ibe /zipe/, -zhibe /z^ipe/ and -xibe /ghipe/ examples in LaFlesche's Osage dictionary without turning up anything. Ditto in Ioway-Otoe, whre the forms would be ziwe, z^iwe, xiwe (ghiwe?), with z tending to appear as dh and z^ as z. I do not guarantee these results. I may not have looked hard enough. Swetland/Stabler give athi'c,ibe /adhi'zibe/ 'to drape', which is interesting in connection with Linda's 'erect tent' gloss. Also aga'zibe ~ adhizibe 'to flap' (note ga- 'by action of wind', dhi- cf. Da yu-, ga- cf. Da ka-). There's also ttiha' wadhi'zibe 'a tarpaulin' (lit. dwelling-skin draping'). Perhaps this is just a homophonous root, or maybe the 'make indentations' sense Linda suggests unites it with the rest. The notion that 'whittle' means 'make scallops' may apply, too, and is essentiallya variant of the former. A more expected gloss would be baz^i'be 'to poke'. There may also be a grade -ghibe in OP: It's possible that a'ghibe 'bracelet' could be 'arm-compresser' (a[a]' 'arm'). Nu[u]'de dhighi'be 'to strangle' is perhaps literally 'throat hand-compress'. But on the other hand nu[u]'de ghighi'be is 'windpipe'. Or maybe that's 'throat compressions'. Obviously you can get carried away with this sort of thing! The only safe approach is to assemble examples and look at the whole pattern and then admit that subsenses or homophones exist. In some cases looking across languages is very revealing. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Oct 14 19:11:53 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 13:11:53 -0600 Subject: Dakota zipA cognates (General comment) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I didn't have a chance to comment on this yesterday. By the time I got back to the list from family activities there was just time to finish up the Winnebago list I had started culling in the morning. I've decided to divide my comments into two parts, one general and one more specific. On Sun, 13 Oct 2002, Linda A Cumberland wrote: > I've been trying to compile a list of Assiniboine verb roots over the past > few weeks In a way the preceding is perhaps the most significant comment to come out of this whole exchange, because it sounds like this means that Linda has been compiling an Assiniboine root list which is sufficiently well developed at this point that it can casually provide 12 entries, if I didn't lose count, relevant to a single chance-mentioned root. And I was just in the proces of saying how useful things like this were! I hope this list will be published at some point! The use in comparative and etymological studies is fairly obvious, but I think that this sort of study has direct applications in language learning and morphological analysis as well. In terms of language learning, I think that direct study of lists like this is perhaps a better way to learn word formation and analysis than the various morphosyntacic approaches used in descriptive grammar, which are, essentially paradigmatic ("dehydrated") as opposed to contextual. I think we are not entirely sure to what extent a speaker of any Siouan language consciously manipulates the various morphological elements (other than pronominals and enclitics) in speaking, but I suspect a fluent speaker is at least aware of the existence of instrumentals and roots in juggling the meanings of words, even though it also seems likely that the pairings and their further derivations are usually lexicalized. Consistent with this, perhaps is the apparent instinct of Siouan speakers in setting up course materials that the essential thing is to learn vocabulary in organized ways. Grammar - syntax and inflection - are regarded as ephemera that can be learned from example in exposure to speakers; the essence of the language is the lexicon that encodes the world view. In contrast the linguist tends to feel that the grammar is the critical element and that the vocabulary can be plugged later as in as needed. The speaker says "Learn these words and by the way you'll notice I use them with this grammar." The linguist says "Learn these paradigms and by the way here are a few words to use them on." I recall that some of the moments of greatest pleasure for the Omaha speakers I worked with involved producing lists of different instrumentals with the same root, or applying sound symbolism to color terms, or, in one case, simply "Oh, I haven't used that word in a long time!" Linguists aren't oblivious to the interest of vocabulary, though they do tend to put it in terms of dehydrated formulae for derivations. ("Just add roots to produce real words!") Siouanists, however, have been repeatedly drawn to an examination of the logic of the Siouan motion verbs, Siouan kinship systems, or Siouan instrumental systems. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Oct 14 19:43:55 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 13:43:55 -0600 Subject: Dakota zipA cognates. (Specific comments) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 13 Oct 2002, Linda A Cumberland wrote: > I've been trying to compile a list of Assiniboine verb roots over the past > few weeks and I was coming to the conclusion that -zip/z^ip (based just > on Assiniboine words) has to do with cutting with something sharp and/or > poking gently. The examples support this, just as the Winnebago examples support mashing something squashy and shaving something off. It's only the sporadic 'pinching', 'nipping' ('stinging') and 'kneading' examples in the various languages that serve to possibly connect everything. I've admitted that this linkage may be imaginary on my part, while trying to suggest that encountering a somewhat diverse aggregation of ideas driving one to such speculations is a typical experience for the comparer of Siouan instrumental roots, whether operating within a language or across several. Clearly the safest or best initial approach is to restrict oneself to quite concrete similarities in meaning, but group these under root shapes, which seems to be what Linda s doing. I believe that's more or less Bob's instinct, too. On the other hand, both Linda and I seem to feel that there may well be connections among the various senses associated with particular root shapes. I think we're both driven to the notion that these connections are more a matter of specific developments, e.g., from 'poking (with poles)' to 'erecting (a tent)' that Linda suggests below, than a matter of a single abstract notion that explains all uses within a langauge (or across several). By the way "instrumental root" here means a root used with instrumentals, not a root that is an instrumental. > There's a lot of overlap between zip and z^ip. Yes, more in Assiniboine than in Winnebago, I think. > As for 'erect, as a tent' I imagine the process of poking tent poles > up under the tent material to stand it up (or is this my own personal > folk etymology?) and 'broadcloth' perhaps having to do with the > fabrication process (ditto, last parenthetical statement). And 'bow', > well, the purpose of a bow certainly is to poke something *and* > cutting (at least piercing) with something sharp. Whether or not the etymology of 'poking with poles' applies historically here, it is plausible enough. It probably works better than my idea of making scalloping sags, especially given the Plains preference for conical tents. (What's the connection on the fabrication process? All I know is that it's a heavy, dense cloth much favored for shawls.) > Here's a selection from my list, with a couple of Doug's thrown in: > > iNkazipa ~ iNkaz^ipa 'a plane, for smoothing wood' > iNpazipa ~ iNpaz^ipa 'a plane, for smoothing wood' > iNtazipa 'bow' Is iN here - at least in the first two forms - a variant of i- or something else? Note that Winnebago also has the same variability in the choice of instrumental for 'plane' (as does Teton: c^haNic^az^ipe, c^haNipaz^ipa - with different ablaut grades, too). > ozipa 'to erect, as a tent' > zipena 'thin' > zizipena ~ zipzipena 'broadcloth' These three are the most problematical in terms of finding a logic uniting the roots, but the 'erect (tent)' sense also appears in Omaha-Ponca with a root of this shape. > naz^ipa 'to pinch by stepping on' > paz^ipa 'to poke (the example I was given was > "like getting a stick to poke an animal on > the road to see if it's dead") > caNkaz^ipa 'to shave wood, to whittle' > yaz^ipa 'to nip lightly with the teeth' > > and my personal favorite: > > iNkpaz^ipa 'to make the sign of the cross, to cross > oneself' (Doug's informant specified that > this involved poking oneself') > > Another interesting one from Doug's Ft. Belknap consultant is: > > osni wiNchaz^iz^ipena 'to be a biting cold, a sharp cold, as on > a clear winter day' Here the 'pinching, biting, nipping' sense comes out very well. I think that's also involved in the Winnebago 'lonely' example, too. These are metaphors with "standard average European" analogs, too. From rankin at ku.edu Mon Oct 14 20:27:45 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 15:27:45 -0500 Subject: Dakota zipA cognates. (Specific comments) Message-ID: >On the other hand, both Linda and I seem to feel that there may well be connections among the various senses associated with particular root shapes. I think we're both driven to the notion that these connections are more a matter of specific developments, e.g., from 'poking (with poles)' to 'erecting (a tent)' that Linda suggests below, than a matter of a single abstract notion that explains all uses within a langauge (or across several). You can go crazy trying to dream up semantic connections. Personally, I conceived of the "stick a hole in" (+ maybe the "pinch") root as being one version and consigned the "smooth, plane" and the "soft, mushy" to a single root, tied together by the soft&smooth notions. I'm not sure it matters. So, are 'bridal TRAIN', choo choo TRAIN and TRAIN for the Olympics examples of homophony or polysemy? ;-) Bob From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Oct 14 21:11:55 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 15:11:55 -0600 Subject: Polysemy vs. Homophony (was RE: Dakota zipA ...) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, Rankin, Robert L wrote: > So, are 'bridal TRAIN', choo choo TRAIN and TRAIN for the Olympics examples > of homophony or polysemy? ;-) I should probably let Alan Hartley answer this one, but I think that the first two are etymologically related. Something about 'following'. I'm not sure about the second. I don't have access to a dictionary at present. Actually, in this case the point is probably moot. The existence of a historical connection doesn't mean that there is a connection in a given English speaker's mind. If things grow far enough apart, they aren't related anymore? JEK From boris at terracom.net Mon Oct 14 21:23:36 2002 From: boris at terracom.net (Alan Knutson) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 16:23:36 -0500 Subject: Polysemy vs. Homophony (was RE: Dakota zipA ...) Message-ID: Perhaps they are connected in the following chain : 1: to trail or drag 2. to aim (ie gun or binoculars) (by visually dragging across a field of view) 3. to bring to bear upon 4. to condition or educate 5. to prepare for an atletic event Alan K ----- Original Message ----- From: "Koontz John E" To: Sent: Monday, October 14, 2002 4:11 PM Subject: Polysemy vs. Homophony (was RE: Dakota zipA ...) > On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, Rankin, Robert L wrote: > > So, are 'bridal TRAIN', choo choo TRAIN and TRAIN for the Olympics examples > > of homophony or polysemy? ;-) > > I should probably let Alan Hartley answer this one, but I think that the > first two are etymologically related. Something about 'following'. I'm > not sure about the second. I don't have access to a dictionary at > present. > > Actually, in this case the point is probably moot. The existence of a > historical connection doesn't mean that there is a connection in a given > English speaker's mind. If things grow far enough apart, they aren't > related anymore? > > JEK > > From ahartley at d.umn.edu Mon Oct 14 22:58:38 2002 From: ahartley at d.umn.edu (Alan H. Hartley) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 17:58:38 -0500 Subject: Polysemy vs. Homophony (was RE: Dakota zipA ...) Message-ID: >>So, are 'bridal TRAIN', choo choo TRAIN and TRAIN for the Olympics examples >>of homophony or polysemy? ;-) > > > I should probably let Alan Hartley answer this one, but I think that the > first two are etymologically related. Something about 'following'. Yup. From rankin at ku.edu Mon Oct 14 23:50:26 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 18:50:26 -0500 Subject: Root lists. Message-ID: Back in the early '90's Wes Jones came up with a computer program (ran in DOS I'm sure) that stripped away locatives, instrumentals, etc. from dictionary files and left him/us with a long list of roots. It was very useful. I'm sure there are more sophisticated ideas about how to do this sort of thing among computer experts, but if anyone is interested, they might contact Wes. He worked his magic on the Buechel dictionary. The results required a little massaging, but it worked. Bob From lcumberl at indiana.edu Tue Oct 15 01:51:24 2002 From: lcumberl at indiana.edu (Linda A Cumberland) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 20:51:24 -0500 Subject: Root lists. In-Reply-To: <000b01c273dc$79429040$e2b5ed81@computer> Message-ID: Is that list still available somewhere? It sure would be a lot easier than sifting through Boas and Deloria! I'm finding a lot of differences between Dakota and Assiniboine in the list I have so far - roughly 300 roots. Seems to warrant continuing the search. I embarked on this project to get a handle on reduplication, since deletion and coda nasalization (the latter being a common effect at borders in Assiniboine) makes some reduplicated forms look related when they're not. But the list is proving useful in a lot of ways. Since there seems to be interest in it, I'll probably include it in my dissertation as an appendix - with the caveat that glosses are provisional! Linda On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, R. Rankin wrote: > Back in the early '90's Wes Jones came up with a > computer program (ran in > DOS I'm sure) that stripped away locatives, > instrumentals, etc. from dictionary files and left > him/us with a long list of roots. It was very useful. > I'm sure there are more sophisticated ideas about how > to do this sort of thing among computer experts, but if > anyone is interested, they might contact Wes. He > worked his magic on the Buechel dictionary. The > results required a little massaging, but it worked. > > Bob > > > From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 15 09:28:53 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 03:28:53 -0600 Subject: Root lists. In-Reply-To: <000b01c273dc$79429040$e2b5ed81@computer> Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, R. Rankin wrote: > Back in the early '90's Wes Jones came up with a computer program (ran > in DOS I'm sure) that stripped away locatives, instrumentals, etc. > from dictionary files and left him/us with a long list of roots. Actually, I believe the data extraction and reformatting on Buechel and some other sources from the Siouan Archives, was done by me. Wes did the sorting and analysis, and I think the idea may have come from the editors in general (Bob Rankin, Dick Carter, Wes Jones, and David Rood). JEK From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 15 09:35:52 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 03:35:52 -0600 Subject: Root lists. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, Linda A Cumberland wrote: > Is that list still available somewhere? It sure would be a lot easier than > sifting through Boas and Deloria! I'm finding a lot of differences between > Dakota and Assiniboine in the list I have so far - roughly 300 roots. > Seems to warrant continuing the search. It might be, and it's easy enough to repeat. The algorithm is just: 1) find headword that matches a regular expression that reprents stuff that can precede instrumentals followed by an instrumental (in the orthography of the file) 2) print unmatched coda followed by comma followed by matched header followed by first n characters of the definition followed by the page reference 3) repeat I wrote the code in AWK and processed (I think) a version of the Siouan Archives Buechel that had been recoded into the Siouan Dictionary character set we had developed for DOS. That's possibly the main problem with resuscitating the files if they still exist - being able to view the character set. > I embarked on this project to get a handle on reduplication, since > deletion and coda nasalization (the latter being a common effect at > borders in Assiniboine) makes some reduplicated forms look related when > they're not. But the list is proving useful in a lot of ways. Since > there seems to be interest in it, I'll probably include it in my > dissertation as an appendix - with the caveat that glosses are > provisional! That sounds like a good idea if space permits! JEK From rankin at ku.edu Tue Oct 15 14:21:12 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 09:21:12 -0500 Subject: Root lists. Message-ID: I'm very sorry, John! My memory is hazy and, of course, I had nothing to do with writing software. For some reason I thought that Wes had done that program up at home and had then applied it to virtually all the MVS languages we were working with. I do recall going through the output for Kansa and Quapaw (at least) to delete nouns and other items the process had been applied to by accident. Part of the "massaging" process. Bob > > Back in the early '90's Wes Jones came up with a computer program (ran > > in DOS I'm sure) that stripped away locatives, instrumentals, etc. > > from dictionary files and left him/us with a long list of roots. > > Actually, I believe the data extraction and reformatting on Buechel and > some other sources from the Siouan Archives, was done by me. Wes did the > sorting and analysis, and I think the idea may have come from the editors > in general (Bob Rankin, Dick Carter, Wes Jones, and David Rood). > > JEK > From rankin at ku.edu Tue Oct 15 14:26:39 2002 From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 09:26:39 -0500 Subject: Root lists. Message-ID: > Is that list still available somewhere? Those lists were an intermediate product, as we were doing entries for the comparative dictionary. If the raw files were retained they would be ASCII files for DOS and they would have been on the Project's computers at Boulder. The very best of those computers were probably 386's and have probably long since been put in the dumpster. I don't know if the disk files were saved or not. It's possible. John and David would be the ones to ask. The nice thing about retrieving those files would be the fact that we had culled through them and eliminiated nouns, adverbs, etc. already, I think. Bob From lcumberl at indiana.edu Tue Oct 15 19:25:00 2002 From: lcumberl at indiana.edu (Linda A Cumberland) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 14:25:00 -0500 Subject: Root lists. In-Reply-To: <001f01c27456$e0d72200$c0b5ed81@computer> Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, R. Rankin wrote: > > Is that list still available somewhere? > > The nice thing about retrieving those files would be > the fact that we had culled through them and > eliminiated nouns, adverbs, etc. already, I think. So I guess the next question is whether there is a hard copy somewhere? Regardless of John's assertion that "it's easy enough to repeat", "easy" is a relative term! And I'm not too likely to undertake such a thing. and anyway, it sounds as though a great deal of work was done on the output, and by a team of people with lots more expertise than I have. But thanks for the algorithm, John. I'll show it to Wally Hooper (at the Institute) and see what he thinks. Linda From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Wed Oct 16 00:18:35 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 18:18:35 -0600 Subject: Root lists. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Linda A Cumberland wrote: > But thanks for the algorithm, John. I'll show it to Wally Hooper (at > the Institute) and see what he thinks. Wally's going to laugh at my calling it an algorithm. It's incredibly simple. The idea is that you have a database which, in simple terms, looks like this: hw bazi'be def pinch ref page 2 hw zaN'de def grive ref page 4 hw a'baz^ibe def raise tent ref page 10 and you search hw fields for patterns like ^(wa|we|a|u|i|)(ga|ba|bi|dha|dhi|mu|ma|na|naN) (i.e., a start of form followed by any of wa, we, etc., or nothing followed by any of ga, ba, etc. You might want to add possessive, etc., forms, e.g., insert {gi|g|kki|) into the list between the other two sublists, etc. You have to allow for e from agi, and some other complications I haven't allowed for, but this is the general idea. When you match a form with this pattern you've got the part it matched and (with a bit more added to the pattern) also the part not matched, and you print the two in reverse order with a comma and a space between them and the defintion and reference appended, getting, e.g., zibe, ba- pinch page 2 z^ibe, a'ba- raise tent page 10 You sort the output on the first field and you're there. Imagine many more examples, of course, to make it interesting. I've neglected accent, but you can handle that by deleting accent marks before doing the match or by allowing 1 or no accent marks after each list item, etc. The second approach is probably better, since you have the accents to reinsert. Note that one can cross compare several languages by inserting in from of each line in the output a "back reconsruction" of the supposed root. For example, replace all b with p and all final e with -, yielding zip- zibe, ba- pinch page 2 z^ip- z^ibe, a'ba- raise tent page 10 Then sort again. Here I'm back transforming Omaha, but if you had an IO file with dhiwe, gi- whittle ... ghiwe, ba- gouge .... that would bve processed by substituting p for w, z for dh and - for final e to yield zip- dhiwe, ga- whittle ... ghip- ghiwe, ba- gouge ... These could be sorted together with lists from other languages because the sort keys (the first fields) are commensurate. You can get a lot out of simple operations like match, extract, transform, and sort. Of course, you need the databases to start with, and there's where the Siouan Archives come in, as well as other files assembled by others. Also, you need a tool that does operations like this. At present the easiest are scripting languages like AWK, TCL, Perl, and so on. SNOBOL or SPITBOL would work, too, or the internal scripting languages built into some text editors, like emacs and its relatives. I say easiest, but some of these may not strike some folks as easy. JEK From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Wed Oct 16 04:49:05 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 22:49:05 -0600 Subject: Root lists. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Koontz John E wrote: > hw bazi'be > def pinch > ref page 2 ... I should point out that I made those examples up, though they may look moderately plausible, or be correct by accident. I'm sorry about the various typos. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Wed Oct 16 05:03:06 2002 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 23:03:06 -0600 Subject: Root lists. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Linda A Cumberland wrote: > So I guess the next question is whether there is a hard copy somewhere? You'd want the files before the hard copy. Anything to avoid scanning or keying. I've checked and I don't happen to have the files on my present system. I have one of the old systems at the house, though I haven't fired it up recently, and don't have easy access to it at the moment. We were pretty assiduous when I was at the Plains Center about copying forward old files to new systems. And we kept working files around. The volumnious files we accumulated occupied shockingly little space on newer hard drives. We also kept a lot of working files on 5.25 in diskettes, though the problem now is to find a drive to read those ... As Bob says, the character encodings were non-standard, though we used the same one across all CSD files. And the same several in preparing printed copies. I think three is a good chance these files still exist and could be used with a little effort. JEK From rood at spot.Colorado.EDU Wed Oct 16 19:11:08 2002 From: rood at spot.Colorado.EDU (ROOD DAVID S) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2002 13:11:08 -0600 Subject: Root lists. In-Reply-To: <001f01c27456$e0d72200$c0b5ed81@computer> Message-ID: I still have one of the computers we used in those days, with all its files intact. If someone wants to look for those lists, you're welcome to come to my office and do so. You will have to remember how to use pre-Windows operating systems. David S. Rood Dept. of Linguistics Univ. of Colorado 295 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0295 USA rood at colorado.edu On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, R. Rankin wrote: > > Is that list still available somewhere? > > Those lists were an intermediate product, as we were > doing entries for the comparative dictionary. If the > raw files were retained they would be ASCII files for > DOS and they would have been on the Project's computers > at Boulder. The very best of those computers were > probably 386's and have probably long since been put in > the dumpster. I don't know if the disk files were > saved or not. It's possible. John and David would be > the ones to ask. > > The nice thing about retrieving those files would be > the fact that we had culled through them and > eliminiated nouns, adverbs, etc. already, I think. > > Bob > From rood at spot.Colorado.EDU Wed Oct 16 19:16:19 2002 From: rood at spot.Colorado.EDU (ROOD DAVID S) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2002 13:16:19 -0600 Subject: Root lists. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Bob, at one of the Siouan conferences -- seems like maybe with MidAmerica in Stillwater or maybe Lawrence (?) Wes reported on that work, I think. It went along with his conclusions about "root extensions", i.e. the idea that the outside consonants in CCVC or CVCC roots are a very old layer of derivational morphology. If you have your conference handouts organized in some way (I could probably find mine with a few hours of searching, but I don't have time for that now) you might locate his handouts. David David S. Rood Dept. of Linguistics Univ. of Colorado 295 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0295 USA rood at colorado.edu On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Linda A Cumberland wrote: > > > On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, R. Rankin wrote: > > > > Is that list still available somewhere? > > > > The nice thing about retrieving those files would be > > the fact that we had culled through them and > > eliminiated nouns, adverbs, etc. already, I think. > > So I guess the next question is whether there is a hard copy somewhere? > Regardless of John's assertion that "it's easy enough to repeat", "easy" > is a relative term! And I'm not too likely to undertake such a thing. and > anyway, it sounds as though a great deal of work was done on the output, > and by a team of people with lots more expertise than I have. > > But thanks for the algorithm, John. I'll show it to Wally Hooper (at > the Institute) and see what he thinks. > > Linda > >