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<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN class=990021320-01022005>I received this
from this scholar in the Netherlands. I haven't replied to it yet, but I'm
sure he would be overjoyed to hear from any of you who can help
him.</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN
class=990021320-01022005></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN
class=990021320-01022005>Bob</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN
class=990021320-01022005></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN
class=990021320-01022005></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV></DIV>
<DIV class=OutlookMessageHeader lang=en-us dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Tahoma
size=2>-----Original Message-----<BR><B>From:</B> Leon Stassen
[mailto:l.stassen@let.ru.nl] <BR><B>Sent:</B> Monday, January 31, 2005 7:51
PM<BR><B>To:</B> Rankin, Robert L<BR><B>Subject:</B> possessive constructions in
siouan<BR><BR></FONT></DIV><BR>Dear Professor Rankin, <BR><BR>You probably do
not know who I am, so allow me to introduce myself: my name is Leon Stassen, and
I am a language typologist working at the universities of Nijmegen and Utrecht
in the Netherlands. I have gotten your name and e-mail address from Marianne
Mithun (UCSB), who recommended you as a leading specialist on Siouan. I wonder
if I could ask you some information on these languages? Such information would
be most welcome for the project on which I am currently working.<BR>
My project concerns the expression of (alienable) predicative possession
in the languages of the world. To put it rather bluntly, I am interested in the
various ways in which a sentence of the type The man has a house/car/ horse
(or whatever things one may alienably possess in the society at issue) is
formally encoded. As is already known in the literature (e.g. Heine 1998), there
are a number of frequently recurring patterns for such sentences, such
as<BR><FONT
size=4>a)<X-TAB> </X-TAB></FONT>the Have
pattern, featuring a transitive verb, with the possessor as the subject and the
possessed item as the direct object; English is of course an example;<BR><FONT
size=4>b)<X-TAB> </X-TAB></FONT>the Locative
Possessive, of the type To/at/near the man, a/his horse is/exists
<BR><FONT size=4>c)<X-TAB> </X-TAB></FONT>the
Topic-possessive, of the type The man, a/his horse exists
<BR><FONT size=4>d)<X-TAB> </X-TAB></FONT>the
With-Possessive, of the type The man exists/is with a/his horse <BR>but I have
found that these are by no means the only ways of predicative possession
encoding. In fact, what I have seen of Siouan languages so far would not
seem to fit straightforwardly into one of these types. If I am right in
interpreting the data so far (but I would appreciate it very much if you would
correct me) , a sentence like 'I have a dog' would, in at least some of the
Siouan languages such as Lakota and Crow, have the rough form of something like
<BR>
dog 1SG.PATIENT-exist<BR>but, of course, I can't be sure
about this, and in any event, I have a serious shortage of data. It would be
very helpful if you could provide me with a sample sentence from one or more of
these languages; and, if it is not too much trouble, perhaps you might be so
kind as to gloss it?<BR> Another thing that is problematic for
me is the fact that, in some grammars of Siouan languages, a verb is featured
which is constantly glossed as a transitve 'have'- item; the Lakota verb 'yuka'
and the Biloxi verb ''ita' are cases in point. Now, as far as my sample goes,
North America is not really a place to have original transitive HAVE-verbs; in
fact, Lakota and Biloxi would stand alone on the continent if they had this
feature. Therefore my question is: is it possible that these 'have'-items are in
fact the products of reanalysis from an erstwhile positional verb such as 'to
stand, to lie' etc. ? This, then, would put these languages on a par with a
development that can be documented for Algonquian, where a positional verb 'aya'
(which means 'to be' in Ojibwa and other Algonquian languages) has been
'transitivized' into a 'have'-verb in Plains Cree. <BR><BR>I am fully
aware that you, as a specialist, must receive quite a few of requests such as
these, and that, moreover, you have more pressing things to do than to answer
all of these queries. Nonetheless, I would be most grateful if you could find
the time for an answer.<BR><BR>Best regards,<BR><BR>Leon Stassen.
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