Historical Explanation for *pi as Plural and Proximate and Nominalizer

[Trechter, Sara]

My email has been out for two days or I'd have posted on this earlier. I agree with Ardis' account, and a couple of years ago presented a paper in Santa Barbara WAIL showing the grammaticalization of /pi/ maybe from that verb meaning 'to accompany' into the different paths of a what John Koontz and others are calling a 'proximate' marker, and the plural in MissVS. There are nice transition examples of this in Lakhota texts collected by Deloria where -pi is used on the verb, but the main actor in the sentence is singular. Deloria points out in a note that for instance if a lot of people arrived or came together, then sometimes only the most prominent person would be mentioned. I think that the nominalizer function comes later.  Here are Lakhota examples and Deloria's comments.  Forgive the enclosure....it captures the font.



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