Fwd: Re: "vertitive"

[Wallace Chafe]

I remember Terry's use of "vertitive" from the time we were both in the
Berkeley linguistics department in the 1960s, but didn't know about his
switch to "versive". For the sake of historical accuracy, I feel I should
mention that "some grammarians" had already been using "inchoative" for the
"become" meaning for some time before that. It was most familiar to me from
Lounsbury's Oneida Verb Morphology, which was published in 1953 but was a
version of the dissertation he wrote in the late 1940s. (If anybody cares
to look, he introduced the "inchoative" derivational suffix on p. 78.) I
always felt uncomfortable with the term, as did Terry, and I wish something
else had caught on, but Iroquoianists and others are still calling it the
"inchoative". As Terry says, it's something that shows up in pretty nearly
all languages. I wouldn't mind if we all switched to "versive", but I guess
that won't happen.

Wally

--On Tuesday, August 31, 2004 8:39 AM -0500 lcumberl at indiana.edu wrote:

>
> I wrote to Terry Kaufman to ask where he first used the term "vertitive"
> so I could provide a citation and got this (surprising) reply. I'm
> forwarding it to the list with his permission.
>
> Linda
>
> ----- Forwarded message from TzajinKajaw at aol.com -----
>     Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 16:15:25 EDT
>     From: TzajinKajaw at aol.com
> Reply-To: TzajinKajaw at aol.com
>  Subject: Re: "vertitive"
>       To: lcumberl at indiana.edu
>
> I coined the term "verititve" and used it for a few years beginning in
> 1960;  around 1970 I reconsidered the derivation and changed it to
> versive.  But it  doesn't mean "going back, returning": it means "to
> become noun/adjective", and  is I believe pretty near a universal
> category/function; this term was devised  by me before some grammarians
> started misapplying the term "inchoative", which  really means "to get
> started doing something"
>
> The category you are referreing to, I think, is one that I call
> "voltative",  and refers to coming back after going somewhere: this
> category is common in  Zapotec.
>
> Best wishes,
> Terry Kaufman
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
>