OP stative verb ablaut?

Koontz John E John.Koontz at colorado.edu
Mon Feb 16 05:51:48 UTC 2004


On Sun, 15 Feb 2004 are2 at buffalo.edu wrote:
> 2. The wa of wakHega does not take the place of the thing hurting.
> WakHega + a body part that hurts maintains the wa.
> Mrs. Marcella Cayou gave an example of this at the UmoNhoN Language
> Center which I don't have right now.  Upon further elicitation, it was
> shown that long term illnesses use wakHega (niye 'hurts' is used for
> short term).  The pattern is ___(body part)__  + wakHega(conjugated)
>
> So,
> TethasoNtasi oN-wakHega
> kidney       me-sick
> 'I have kidney disease.'
>
> This supports an analysis of wa- as an activity marker (it removes
> telicity, end points) which developed from the plural object but is
> now separate.

This is particularly interesting.  It plumps wakhe'ga back into the
syntactic experiencer verb class, but plays hob with my "wa- as patient"
arguments, though I belive that they are still essentially correct
diachronically.

One thing tha has occurred to me is to wonder if perhaps essentially verbs
of the stative morphological persuasion might not potentially be able to
behave as experiencer verbs.  For example, with bize 'be dry', perhaps one
can easily say

(?) unaN'z^iN aNbi'ze
    shirt     I am dry

    'my shirt is dry'

The fact that an extra wa- is required in this usage with ski'ge 'heavy'
might suggest to the contrary, or maybe the wa- wouldn't be needed in a
sentence like

(?) niN'de aNski'ge
    rump   I am heavy

Or maybe si' 'foot' would work here.  I'm trying to think of inalienable
heavy things.

I might had that my impression that wa- in wakhe'ga 'be sick' refers, at
least originally, to the affected organ is founded at least partly on
comparative evidence:

Os  ...huhe'ga (stative) 'sick'
Ks  ...huhe'ga (stative) 'sick'

I think here hu- is 'bone, leg', historically, i.e., 'bone-hega', and that
wakhega is wa-k-hega, with a dative prefix, e.g., 'for one's wa- to be
hega'.  The morphosyntax PAT+N(incorporated)+VERB is unusual.  Hu- would
have to be non-transparent, or one would expect N(inc)+PAT+VERB.

I don't see anything comparable in Quapaw, and I don't know of any sure
cognates outside of Dhegiha, though IO has he'ge 'little, a little, not
very much', and Dakota has he'kta 'that behind, last (of a time period)'.
I suppose the latter is he-k-ta 'toward that', but I'm not sure.  The
expected Dakotan cognate form would be *(k)hec^a, and, of course, he'c^a
is 'thus' < he 'that', but there are no traces of he 'that in Dhegiha.
None of these seem strikingly plausible. In particular, nothing with
*(k)heka in the fairly direct sense of 'sick, feeble' appears that I am
aware of.



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