OP stative verb ablaut?

[Rory M Larson]

John wrote:
> Well, certainly not in regard to "proximate" marking and maybe wa plurals
> for the third person!  Do you or Ardis have a better term for his?  It
> really is something like conceptual proximacy or nearness or centrality
in
> some sense, in Ardis's analysus, I think, but it's not really Agonnquian
> proximate/obviative marking.

Well, I don't know enough Algonquian to find the terms objectionable!
I'm still wrestling with the concept itself, though I think I'm getting
closer to understanding how it works.  "Focus", as distinct from
grammatical
subject, is perhaps what it is about.  If you and Ardis are comfortable
with the terms, so am I.


> My point then is that experiencer verbs are not statives, though from a
> purely morphological point of view, they do mostly have just one patient
> inflection and are easily confused with statives, especially when it is
> not not always obvious from an English perspective that there is a second
> argument, as in the case of 'sick' or 'brave' or 'holy'.  [...]

Here, I'm going to argue a little.  It seems that you are taking
verbs from three different grammatical classes, combining them
into one which you call "experiencer verbs", and holding them as
exclusive of stative verbs.  My understanding of "stative verbs"
has always been that they are a set of words approximately
equivalent to English adjectives, except that they conjugate as
verbs, using the object, or patient, pronouns only.  This would
be a functional/morphological class.  By that definition, dhiNge'
would be a stative, albeit a bit unusual in intrinsically
referencing a non-existent 3rd person object in addition to an
optional patient subject.  This is just a nuance of the allowed
argument list of the verb, much as 'give' differs from 'steal' in
English.  The fact that some verbs use wa- prefixes and have
animate subjects shouldn't disqualify them from being statives.
Datives like git?e' on the other hand would be another class
entirely.  Why can't we have stative verbs as a morpho-syntactic
class, have experiencer verbs as a semantic class, and expect that
the two classes may partially overlap?


> I think wakhe'ga is pretty much along these lines, but the body part that
> is the source of the illness is represented by wa-.  I doubt you can say
> anything like 'I am sick to my stomach' with this verb, along the lines
of
> *ni'gha ankhe'ga, though I've never asked. [...]
>
> Anyway, I think that all the rather large class of wa-prefixed "statives"
> are probably actually experiencer verbs.  Some may allow replacing wa
with
> a noun, or even supplementing it.

I think this argument depends on what we believe that wa-
primordially represents.  Your view seems to be that it is originally
a patient marker.  Hence, a verb marked with wa- must have
that wa- pointing to a noun somewhere, even if it is hard to
tell what that noun could be.  The view I posted during the
great wa- discussion of a few weeks ago was that wa- was
originally a generalizer, and only secondarily and in certain
circumstances came to function as the patient marker for 'us'
and 'them'.  In other circumstances, wa- became a noun head,
or continued as a generalizer.

I think the wakhe'ga class of verbs exemplifies the generalization
function of wa-.  These verbs seem to be a class of statives in
which the wa- makes the attribute a permanent feature of a person
rather than simply a time-neutral condition.  Although most of the
terms I gave in my basic list of wa- statives probably do not
allow decomposition into wa- + stative verb today, it does seem
to be the case that wa- can be added fairly freely to many
unquestionably stative verbs, and the conjugation follows the
expected (stative type) wa- paradigm.  Examples the speakers
approved included:

    ski'ge              heavy (objective description)
    oNski'ge            I am heavy.
    dhiski'ge           Thou art heavy.
    waski'ge            We are heavy.

    waski'ge            heavy (person is stout)
    oNwoN'skige         I am heavy.
    wadhi'skige         Thou art heavy.
    wawa'skige          We are heavy.

My feeling is that prefixed wa- is to statives about what
postfixed -s^toN is to active verbs in the sense of indicating
characteristic as opposed to specific.

Rory




                      Koontz John E
                      <John.Koontz at colorad        To:       siouan at lists.colorado.edu
                      o.edu>                      cc:
                      Sent by:                    Subject:  Re: OP stative verb ablaut?
                      owner-siouan at lists.c
                      olorado.edu


                      02/08/2004 06:56 PM
                      Please respond to
                      siouan






On Sun, 8 Feb 2004, Rory M Larson wrote:
> Thanks, John.  I gather we don't really have the stative verb system
> very well worked out yet for OP.

Well, certainly not in regard to "proximate" marking and maybe wa plurals
for the third person!  Do you or Ardis have a better term for his?  It
really is something like conceptual proximacy or nearness or centrality in
some sense, in Ardis's analysus, I think, but it's not really Agonnquian
proximate/obviative marking.

> The examples you have given are from Dorsey, and all are third person.
> The grammar for modern Omaha may have changed a bit, and we're looking
> for personal inflections here to build a conjugation paradigm.  You may
> be right that ablaut may have to do more with proximate-obviative issues
> than with plurality; we need to pursue that angle more.

I think we definitely need to establish what article sets work with the
third person subjects in question. Maybe things work different for
animates and inanimates?  That's a fairly common Siouan pattern.  It might
not hurt to do a little context building in the elicitation, too, if
that's not happening.  I came to the conclusion - after my limited
fieldwork, unfortunately - that that might alleviate some of the problems
I was having with contexts.  People often reacted to my examples by
explaining that "people wouldn't say that."  This would be a response to
something like "I am tall" that seems perfectly natural in English, albeit
even non-linguists are probably trained to a fairly high standard of
tolerance decontextualization of academic languages like English by the
educational system.  The problem with "I am tall," by the way, was that it
sounded like bragging.

An ideal approach to contextualizaiton would be to work from a text
offered by the speaker(s), but it might be possible to use arbitary
scenarioes.  Something like: "My brother got caught in the rain.  He was
really wet.  He came home and dried off.  Now he's dry.  If he were
talking to me he'd say "I'm dry."  His friends were with him.  Now they're
dry."  That sort of thing.

> Some verbs may apply only to inanimate objects, such as 'shallow' and
> 'deep' for water.

Unfortunately, that seems to be true of a lot of statives.

> Others may apply only to animate beings.  Perhaps these are what you are
> referring to as 'experiencer verbs'; I'm not sure what all is included
> in this class.

We've talked about these in the past.  I think these are a difficult
category to get hold of for Siouanists.  I may be totally off track with
them myself.  They usually do have animate subjects.  The subject governs
patient or dative patient concord.  However, there is a second noun in the
frame, a theme I think it is sometimes called, the thing through which or
by virtue of which the experiencer experiences the experience (sorry about
that).

A good example with a plain patient is - I believe - dhiNge' 'to lack, not
to have'.  The pattern is P1 aNdhiN'ge, P2 dhidhiN'ge, P12 wadhiN'ge, but
this is clearly not a stative verb.  There is an additonal element, the
thing lacked.  The thing lacked is the theme - if we can use that word.
Is there a better oword?  I suspect that in OP this thing lacked has to be
a third person - that it would be unnatural or even impossible to lack a
first, second, or inclusive person.  Some form of periphrasis would be
needed to address the concept.  I have certainly never seen any examples
like 'I don't have you'.

A good example with dative patient concord seems to be git?e' 'for one's
relative to be dead'.  The kinship relation who has died is the theme.
The inflectional pattern is P1 iNt?e', P2 dhit?e, P12 wet?e.  Again, I
don't think I've sen any examples like 'you are dead to me', though these
a perhaps a bit more plausible, at least to anyone with with a Western, or
at rather, European outlook.

I think wakhe'ga is pretty much along these lines, but the body part that
is the source of the illness is represented by wa-.  I doubt you can say
anything like 'I am sick to my stomach' with this verb, along the lines of
*ni'gha ankhe'ga, though I've never asked.  I think tha for this sort of
hting you have to substitute ni(y)e 'to pain one', cf., ni'gha ni'e
'stomach ache'.  This is also an experiencer, verb pattern, I believe,
though the texts seem to have the experiencer pattern ni'gha i'nie, e.g.
ni'gha aNdhaNnie 'my stomach pains me', and I'm not sure what the odds are
between i'nie and nie.

Anyway, I think that all the rather large class of wa-prefixed "statives"
are probably actually experiencer verbs.  Some may allow replacing wa with
a noun, or even supplementing it.

My point then is that experiencer verbs are not statives, though from a
purely morphological point of view, they do mostly have just one patient
inflection and are easily confused with statives, especially when it is
not not always obvious from an English perspective that there is a second
argument, as in the case of 'sick' or 'brave' or 'holy'.  Nevertheless, I
think that that in leaving experiencer verbs out of consideration we are
making a serious error and one that will trip us up in various ways.  For
example, it would be extremely likely that experiencer verbs and statives
would take proximate and plural marking in rather different ways.  For one
thing, there is another noun in the frame, and this might govern the
plural/proximate marker or even a wa-prefix.  For another, experiencer
verbs do seem mostly to take animate "experiencer subjects" and animacy
may also be relevant.

(Here, in the interest of brevity, I've omitted the part of Rory's letter
that lists specific wa-verbs that I suspect are experiencer verbs.)

> We have been having a little trouble with the wa- ('us' & 'them')
> forms on some of our verbs, as you intimate.  Some words, like
> toN'ga and s^toN'ga, are accepted readily in all forms including
> the wa-.  Others seem to be acceptable with wa- only when the
> verb is preceeded by some other pronoun like woN'oNgidhe,
> woN'oNdoN, or s^e'ama.  The words z^iN'ga, s^u'ga, bdhe'ka, gdhe'ze,
> gdhe'z^e, da', sagi' and nu'ka seem to fall into this category.
> My example of bi'ze now seems to have been particularly ill-chosen,
> as one of our speakers now seems to find wabi'ze/a unacceptable
> under any circumstance.

These all seem to me likely to be stative.  The only thing I can think of
is that some of the forms with wa- are effectively nominalizations, and
the forms like s^e'=ama wabdhe'kka amount to 'these are thin things',
whereas wabdhe'kka alone is just 'thing thing', and doens't make a good
predication.

> Yet another interesting kink is that our speakers sometimes
> shift the accent to the last syllable of some multi-syllable
> stative verbs normally accented on the first syllable.  Mark and
> I were told in our session on Friday that this is how one gives
> a comparative in Omaha:
>
>   toN'ga - 'he is big'
>   toNga' - 'he is bigger'
>
>   oNtoN'ga - 'I am big'
>   oN'toNga' - 'I am bigger'

Interesting.  It may not be a comparative in the strict sense, but it does
seem like some sort of focus-based accentual shift.

> If the neutral form ends in -e, this accent shift causes ablaut.
>
>   oNha'hade - 'I am light (weight)'
>   oN'hahada' - 'I am lighter'
>
> However, this same mechanism also seems to be used sometimes in
> place of the wa- pronoun to indicate plurality:
>
>   gdhe'ze             - 'it is striped'
>   woN'oNgidhe gdheza' - 'they are all striped'
>
> Anyway, that's where we seem to be at right now.  It's quite
> probable that I'm are confused on some things.  Any further
> suggestions or comments on this would be very welcome!

I wonder if some of the accented vowels are just long (...a=i > a:).
This is one of the contexts where I used to think maybe there was length.

It would be interesting to know what the pitch contours over these forms
are.  I suspect one of the things that trips people up in listening for
accent is associating it with length (which is more or less an appropriate
cue in English).