animate wa-

[REGINA PUSTET]

Regarding (hypothetical) animacy of wa- and
non-specificity of wicha-, here's some more examples;
they are just a couple of hours old:

(1)	okichize el ota      wicha-kte-pi
	war        in  many  WICHA-kill-PL
	'many were killed in the war'

(2)	*okichize el  ota       wa-kte-pi
	war           in  many  WA-kill-PL
	'many were killed in the war'

I hope that with ota 'many', I have created a PAT that
is non-specific enough to "deserve" being
cross-referenced by wa-, at least theoretically.
Still, the wa-version (2) is ungrammatical -- the
affix that must be used here is wicha-. While in the
above examples, the PAT is human, in (3) and (4),
animals are the implied referents in the PAT slot:

(3)	owichakte  el ota       wicha-kte-pi
	slaughter   in  many   WICHA-kill-PL
	'many were killed in the slaughter'

(4)	*owichakte el  ota       wa-kte-pi
	slaughter     in  many   WA-kill-PL
	'many were killed in the slaughter'

These examples, contra Shaw (1980), might be taken as
proving my intuition about the non-animate reference
of wa-. Thus, wicha-, rather than wa-, codes
non-specific animate PATs.
The form wawokiya 'to help people with something' in
my previous post, however, remains a grain in the
ointment. My speaker feels that in this case, wa-
indeed expresses the notion of 'people in general'.


> > hé    thokéya   pteblés^ka   ki   wichá-kte-pi
> > that  first     cattle       DEF  3PL.PAT-kill-PL
> >
> > na    wa-pháta-pi
> > and   WA-butcher-PL
> > 'first they killed the cows and butchered them'
> >
>
> I would have expected wicha-phata-pi rather than
> wa-phata. Could the sentence
> mean something like, ‘they killed the cows and then
> they did some butchering’?

This is exactly how I would translate it.

Regina

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