Tutelo verb 'go'

David Kaufman dvkanth2010 at GMAIL.COM
Sat Jun 15 00:39:52 UTC 2013


Bob,

The independent/disjunctive first person pronoun in Tutelo is wi:ma
(Oliverio p. 148); wi- is the stative/dative/patient first person pronoun
(Oliverio p. 71); wa- is the first person actor pronoun (Oliverio p. 64).
The sentences Oliverio (p. 63) gives are as follows: wi-le:-ta i-athi: =
1sgP-go-POT DIR-house 'I am going to the house'; wi-hi:-ok hiyaNka =
1sgP-arrive--past2 sleep 'I came, he was asleep.'  Note that both 'go' and
'come/arrive' use the first person patient/stative prefix.  There is an
interesting quote by Oliverio: "...it seems that some reinterpretation of
the active/stative system took place, probably as a result of the limited
use of the language and semi-fluency of most speakers at the time of
collection, and from the probable use of Tutelo as a trade language.  Thus
for instance some verbs of motion, denoting events performed, effected, and
instigated, and typically controlled, by the speaker, take stative
pronominal prefixes, not the expected active morphology" (p. 62).

So, at least according to Oliverio and her consultants, her 'patient' or
'stative' prefixes are used for 'go, come.'

As I said, a similar phenomenon seems to occur in Atakapa with 'go', and
Danny Hieber, who works on Chitimacha, has discovered the same phenomenon
with Chitimacha 'go.'

So it looks like this deserves further study, not only in Tutelo, but in
other languages (e.g., Atakapa, Chitimacha) that seem to share a similar
phenomenon.  Perhaps Marianne is right; maybe the terminology is the
problem - I'm not sure.

Dave

On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 5:44 PM, 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 Kansas
> Linguistic Anthropology
>



-- 
David Kaufman, Ph.C.
University of Kansas
Linguistic Anthropology
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