Active/stative verbs again.

[Rankin, Robert L]

My thanks to those who have responded with comment and examples, both
on- and off-list.  It looks as though there are no constraints on
biclausal sentences with coreferential subjects and one active and one
stative verb.  Disambiguation of such sentences with 3sg. subjects and
3sg. objects, however, presents interesting problems.  Shannon's Nakoda
speakers require the same subject for both verbs -- the object of the
first cannot be the subject of the second without an overt noun
apparently.   

Other dialects may be different: Constantine Chmielnicki reminds me that
Van Valin and Richard Lungstrum have separately posited that the use of
"conjunctions" or "switch reference" markers, /cha/ and /na/ may be used
by Lakota speakers to eliminate confusion.  I haven't yet had a chance
to look at these sources.

I suspect that this may well be true quite generally with the languages
that have S/R morphology.  These would presumably include Crow, Hidatsa,
Mandan and Biloxi.  I have Randy's dissertation and MA thesis and will
be checking further.

I suspect that the same goal would be accomplished using
proximate/obviative morphology in Dhegiha dialects.  This too is
hypothetical at the moment, since a preliminary search of Dorsey's 1890
text collection hasn't yet revealed any applicable instances.  No doubt
there are some, but my search technique so far is somewhat primitive.  

The disambiguation problem doesn't seem usually to bear on the
active/stative question though.  It seems that some more investigation
across Siouan would be useful on this/these topics though.

Any further data or comments would be most welcome.

Bob

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/siouan/attachments/20040213/e5ac6375/attachment.html>