Irregular Verbs vs. Minor (or Alternate) Paradigms

[Koontz John E]

The pipe discussion has brought up an interesting point.  Do Siouan
languages have regular and irregular verbs or major and minor paradigms
related to each other by (more or less) obvious rules?

The tradition in Dakotan grammar is to refer to everything but the
"regular" (wa/ya) paradigm as irregular.  I'd have to check to be sure of
the precise status of y-stems.  Anyone who knows of the bat, weigh in,
please!

In contrast Lipkind's Winnebago grammar opposes "first" and "second"
conjugations, the latter covering the collected minor paradigms.

Looking at things in a diachronic perspective I tend to think in terms of
syncopated ("irregular") vs. non-syncopated ("regular" paradigms).  Or
maybe it's basic ("irregular") and epenthetic ("regular").  More precisely
I think of "long" and "short" active pronouns - *wa/*ya vs.  *w/*y, and
consider that long pronouns occur with clusters, complex stops,
fricatives, etc., while short pronouns occur with the rest.  Since the
short pronouns interact with the following initial segment of the stem, I
tend to refer to the different patterns of interaction as a special
*r-stem, *p-stem, etc., paradigm.

This isn't quite the whole picture, since there are several paradigms that
involve *(r)VkV-formants or their developments, not to mention the
interactions of the pronouns with the locatives, etc.

However, the more I've looked at Siouan conjugation the more I've realized
that the extent to which a languages' descriptions refer to regular and
irregular or major and minor paradigm is largely a matter of taste.  I say
this for two reasons.

First, because, essentially all Siouan languages have at least "regular"
and "*r-stems" (Da y-stem) verbs, and all MVS languages have ?-stems and
h-stems (as do some others).  About the only the class that is not found
everywhere is the stop-stems (*p-, *t-, *k-stems), and relatively few
languages are missing it.  Dakotan happens to be one of them, and even so
it has a number of traces of it.

Second, because in all Siouan languages the number of forms that
participate in one of the minor paradigms is very small.  The largest
apparent exceptions occur where an instrumental in *r- (Da y-) or *p (Da
p-) participates, in which case the large number or derived forms that use
this instrumental all participate.

What this means is that the number of groups irregular verbs in Dakotan is
not far shy of the number of minor paradigms in Omaha-Ponca or Winnebago.
But Dakotanists prefer to call them irregular verbs, whereas the student
of Dhegiha and Winnebago-Chiwere prefer to call them minor paradigms.
It's probably mainly the comparativists who look at the forms and conclude
quickly that all of the paradigms can be predicted with a few simple rules
applied to the regular paradigm.

John E. Koontz
http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz