argument structure k'u etc.

"Alfred W. Tüting" ti at fa-kuan.muc.de
Fri Apr 1 05:57:17 UTC 2005


 >> As far as I had understood this issue, it's the dative structure,
i.e. the personal affix pointing to the "receiver": sunkawankan kin mni
wicak'u (he gave water to the horses) - right? <<<<

 > (David) That's the way it works in languages that have datives for
recipients. Many languages, like Lakhota, do not use datives for the
recipient of the verb 'give': (...) <<


I'd be interested in examples of other languages.


 >'give' is syntactically transitive, not ditransitive; only two
participants are indexed in the verb, and one of them is the recipient.
  The so-called accusative or direct object is not an argument. I would
not call 'horses' in your example an indirect object in Lakhota --
it's clearly the direct object, from the point of view of the grammar of
that language.  Lakhota has unambiguous datives marked with -ki-, but
this verb doesn't make use of them. <<


1) I'd state that the very "idea" of "to give" actually is dative
(although there are other - special - verbs for it that are not, e.g.
German: "beschenken" -> accusative, etc.).
2) Moreover, I'd suspect that _k'u_ in Lakota is a somewhat unusual form
actually having the dative particle _-ki-_ built in (*ki-u -> k'u,
phonetically maybe similar to _k'un_ <- *kin un).
3) That's what I found at B. Ingham's: wicacic'u [wicha'chic?u] given as
"I gave you to them". Also: wicanic'u [wicha'nic?u] translated as "They
gave you to them "in marriage)" (which I'd expected to be wicanic'upi,
instead).
Maybe Bruce will comment on this?


Alfred



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