Tutelo verb 'go'

Anthony Grant Granta at EDGEHILL.AC.UK
Mon Jun 17 21:52:24 UTC 2013


The use of SVO won't prove that something is pidginiselatid, but it
would certainly be a signal that the data are anomalous (they could be
translationese, Saponi words with English syntax).  I think Dave and
I can agree that seeing SVO order is enough to spark curiosity.

The SVO in some Tutelo sentences surprises me - were the data not
elicited via Cayuga?  (Could Horatio H speak an Iroquoian language?)

Anthony

>>> "Rankin, Robert L." <rankin at KU.EDU> 06/17/13 10:29 PM >>>
Well, I agree with both of you to a point. If ire really means 'you go',
then we have a little inflection. On the other hand, i- 'you' is a
replacement prefix. The inherited 2nd person prefix would have been ลก-.
I- would be derived from the independent pronoun.  So one could argue
either way.  Either it's inflection or it is the replacement of
inflection with an independent pronoun.  And the order is indeed the
very un-Siouan SVO.  Note, however, that there are several SVO sentences
among those recorded by linguists looking at Tutelo proper.

Bob

________________________________________
From: Siouan Linguistics [SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu] on behalf of Anthony
Grant [granta at EDGEHILL.AC.UK]
Sent: Monday, June 17, 2013 1:57 PM
To: SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu
Subject: Re: Tutelo verb 'go'

Dave et al: this would be supportive but not definitive evidence. What
is the clincher is the dearth of productive inflectional morphology.

Anthony

>>> David Kaufman <dvkanth2010 at GMAIL.COM> 17/06/2013 19:44 >>>
The one sentence in your data, Bob, 'hodke tok ire chunkete posse',
would
seem to indicate a pidginized language, since most pidgins, I think,
adopt
Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) order (with the major exception of Mobilian
Jargon, which maintained a verb-final order).

Great paper!

Dave

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 11:44 AM, ROOD DAVID S
<david.rood at colorado.edu>wrote:

> Wow... sounds a little like the Hindi (and neighbors) shift from
> accusative to ergative in perfect tenses.
>
> Have you ever thought of any tests for "stativity" in Siouan
> besides the pronoun choices? Lakota stative verbs use a different
pattern
> for reduplication than do active verbs, and there are separate rules
for
> k-palatalization for statives (nikhuz^e without palatalization, e.g.).
I
> don't have those facts clear in my head, however. Anything else?
>
> I appreciate Bob's description of the evolution of these patterns
> in OVS, blaming most of it on phonology, and I always prefer a
phonological
> explanation to a semantic one. But the fact that motion verbs take
patient
> pronouns here and there, as mentioned in some of the other
contributions to
> this thread, makes one wonder if there's more to it than phonology.
>
> Best,
> David
>
>
>
> David S. Rood
> Dept. of Linguistics
> Univ. of Colorado
> 295 UCB
> Boulder, CO 80309-0295
> USA
> rood at colorado.edu
>
> On Sat, 15 Jun 2013, Marianne Mithun wrote:
>
> Ah, it's in the aspect suffixes, loud and clear. In Northern Iroquoian
>> (which is all of Iroquoian except Cherokee), all verbs (except
imperatives)
>> are obligatorily inflected for aspect: Habitual, Perfective, or
Stative. So
>> for that, we just look at the marking on the end.
>>
>> Stative verbs include things that everyone would immediately agree
are
>> states: 'be rich', 'be new' . . . Here the choice of pronominal
paradigm
>> is interesting. For resultant states ('wet'), usually patient
prefixes are
>> used. For inherent states, usually agent forms.
>>
>> For transitive verbs, the statives are perfect, a kind of resultant
>> state: 'I have eaten'. These have stative endings and patient
pronominal
>> prefixes. (I'm just sitting here full now.)
>>
>> An interesting wrinkle is that some formally stative verbs are things
>> that we might think, from their translations, as say progressive:
>> 'singing'. These are often activities without a tangible product. The
verb
>> 'go' could be interpreted as 'be in motion' perhaps, as one grasps at
>> straws for an explanation.
>>>> patients, such as 'to lose something', 'to yell', etc.) The agent or
>> patient paradigm gets established with a particular verb stem, and
will
>> stick even if the stem meanders semantically.
>>
>> Iroquoian is thus a little more interesting, because there is a
basically
>> agent/patient system with an active/stative overlay (stative perfects
>> obligatorily occurring with patients).
>>
>> Marianne
>>
>>
>> --On Saturday, June 15, 2013 6:39 PM -0600 ROOD DAVID S <
>> david.rood at COLORADO.EDU> wrote:
>>
>> Marianne, thanks for that little essay. What are the "stative"
>>> properties of Iroquoian 'go'? I'm used to relying on the pronoun
choice
>>> to classify the verbs; how do you separate them?
>>> Best,
>>> David
>>>
>>> David S. Rood
>>> Dept. of Linguistics
>>> Univ. of Colorado
>>> 295 UCB
>>> Boulder, CO 80309-0295
>>> USA
>>> rood at colorado.edu
>>>
>>> On Fri, 14 Jun 2013, Marianne Mithun wrote:
>>>
>>> Actually this is exactly why it is important to distinguish
>>>> active/stative patterns from agent/patient patterns. Active/stative
>>>> patterns are driven by Aktionsart, that is, the difference between
>>>> events and states. Agent/patient systems are driven by the role of
the
>>>> referent, as instigating, volitional, in control, etc. Both occur,
>>>> sometimes within the same language, but agent/patient systems are
much
>>>> more common cross-linguistically.
>>>>
>>>> The two often yield similar patterns. Events are often instigated
by
>>>> agents and states often impact patients. A verb like 'jump' denotes
an
>>>> event and would usually appear with an agent in agent/patient
systems,
>>>> and an active participant in active/stative systems; a verb like
'be
>>>> sick' denotes a state and would usually appear with a patient in
>>>> agent/patient systems, and a stative participant in active/stative
>>>> systems. But it is exactly in situations like the ones we're
discussing
>>>> that the distinction is important. From there of course
>>>> cross-linguistic details become interesting: whether instigation or
>>>> control is criterial when they do not coincide, what is classified
as
>>>> volitional, what is classified as a state, etc.
>>>>
>>>> (In Iroquoian languages, 'go' is grammatically stative, but occurs
with
>>>> agent pronominals, not surprisingly.)
>>>>
>>>> Marianne.
>>>>
>>>> --On Friday, June 14, 2013 10:44 PM +0000 "Rankin, Robert L."
>>>> <rankin at KU.EDU> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> That sounds very peculiar to me. I suspect that what you're seeing
is
>>>>> the disjunctive (i.e., independent) pronominal for the 1st person
>>>>> rather
>>>>> than the patient. You may already have my active/stative
comparative
>>>>> paper, but just in case, I'll attach a copy. The last section is
an
>>>>> addition on OVS that attempts to explain the pronominals. Bottom
line:
>>>>> I don't think Tutelo uses stative subjects with "go".
>>>>>
>>>>> Bob
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> ______________________________**____________________
>>>>>
>>>>> From: Siouan Linguistics [SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu] on behalf of
David
>>>>> Kaufman [dvkanth2010 at GMAIL.COM]
>>>>> Sent: Friday, June 14, 2013 4:13 PM
>>>>> To: SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu
>>>>> Subject: Tutelo verb 'go'
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>
>>>>> It seems Tutelo's verb 'go' takes a patientive/object rather than
>>>>> active/subject pronoun prefix, wi- instead of wa-. Does any other
>>>>> Siouan language do this? (I can't compare with Biloxi since it
lost
>>>>> this agent/patient distinction in pronouns.) I'm particularly
>>>>> interested in this because two Lower Mississippi Valley languages,
>>>>> Atakapa and Chitimacha, also seem to take patientive/object
instead of
>>>>> active/subject pronouns with the verb 'go.' At first I thought
this
>>>>> was strange and counterintuitive, but now I'm seeing it may be a
more
>>>>> common phenomenon well beyond the Mississippi Valley. Any
thoughts?
>>>>>
>>>>> Dave
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> David Kaufman, Ph.C.
>>>>> University of KanLinguistic Anthropology

Edge Hill University
Times Higher University of the Year - shortlisted 2007, 2010, 2011
www.edgehill.ac.uk


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Edge Hill University
Times Higher University of the Year - shortlisted 2007, 2010, 2011
www.edgehill.ac.uk


This message is private and confidential. If you have received this
message in error, please notify the sender and remove it from your
system. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of Edge Hill or associated
companies.  Edge Hill University may monitor email traffic data and also
the content of email for the purposes of security and business
communications during staff absence.



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