wa- as indefinite-plural-human

[Catherine Rudin]

I'm still of the "why can't it be both" persuasion.  

This is a really nice example of wa as argument.  But that doesn't mean it's ALWAYS an argument; I'd be perfectly happy with it being sometimes an argument, sometimes a valence reducer, and sometimes ambiguous.  

Catherine

>>> Bryan James Gordon <linguista at gmail.com> 12/7/2009 6:50 PM >>>
I've got something I just found in Dorsey which may help back up des Herrn
Professor Doktor Boyle claim that those pesky wa- prefixes are not valence
reducers but actual arguments. Look at the agreement here:

(Dorsey 1890: 120.4-5)
Xubái égaⁿ égithaⁿi ki wébahaⁿ-hnáⁿi he.
sacred.3PROX 3.SIM say.to.PL when WA.know-FREQ.3PROX DECL.F
"Since he is sacred, when they say it to [one another], he always knows it
of them."

It's important to realise that in O&P (other languages too?) "know" is a
subject-object-raising verb, and obligatorily takes as its object the
subject of the subordinate clause. (This is as far as I'm aware, I don't
know if that's universally true of course.) The subject of the subordinate
clause here is "indefinite-plural-human", just like the non-referring
3rd-person-plural stuff you get in Romance languages. And it just so happens
that there is an object morpheme for that sort of argument: wa!

Oh well, the valence-reducer idea was nice though, wasn't it?

- Bryan