Algonquian Parallel? Muskogean Parallel?

Pamela Munro munro at ucla.edu
Thu Oct 3 01:30:48 UTC 2002


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



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