Areal prefix

[James Crippen]

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 12:21, Seth Cable <scable at linguist.umass.edu> wrote:
> Hi James,
>
> I'm pretty sure there's discussion of the areal in Rice's (2000) book.  I'm away
> from my "office library", so I can't double check, but just thought I'd shoot
> that out there...

>From the index, it appears on pp. 55–59, 326, and 328. In the former
range, Rice argues that it quantifies entities, and thus agrees with
areal nouns which are direct arguments of verbs, but does not agree
(doesn't apppear) when such nouns are adjuncts. She goes on to discuss
the distributive and nonspecific pronouns in the same sense as
(D-)quantifiers.

"Areal entities include: weather, rivers, mountains, houses, holes,
cities, and other locations in space and time..."

On pp. 326 and 328 she discusses its use in Ahtna and Slave in
agreeing with space/time nouns in a manner similar to the noun class
prefixes.

Note that she doesn't discuss its use as a thematic prefix.

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 07:32,  Willem de Reuse <rwd0002 at unt.edu> wrote:
> There are discussions of the areal prefix in my and Phillip Goode's "A
> Practical Grammar of San Carlos Apache", Lincom-Europa, 2006, pages 118-119,
> (subject prefix), pages 218-220 (object prefix).
>
> It's supposed to be a grammar of the San Carlos dialect of Western Apache,
> but it really covers the White Mountain dialect as well.
>
> The semantics of the prefix go- are interesting:  not only does it refer to
> areas or spaces or time periods, but also by some sort of metaphorical
> extension to things such as ceremonies, telephone calls, and one's name.
>  And sometimes it is a thematic prefix, not doing much of anything.

Thanks Willem, it's on its way to me via ILL right now...

Interestingly, I'm seeing a somewhat similar thing in Tlingit. It's
somehow metaphorically extended in a lot of verbs, but in a few places
it just seems to be arbitrarily added as a thematic prefix.

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 14:06, William J Poser <wjposer at ldc.upenn.edu> wrote:
> Chad Thompson has a paper on the areal prefix in Koyukon in
> IJAL 59.3.315-333 (1993).

Thanks Bill, this is the best discussion I've seen yet! Thompson makes
a couple of interesting points that I needed to know.

I recall seeing somewhere that the areal prefix was reconstructed as
*qu-, however Thompson (1993: 326) has it from Hoijer (1971) as *qʷə-.
Does anyone offhand recall who claimed it to be *qu-, and where/when?
I guess it doesn't really matter for what I'm doing, but I'd like to
be clear about citations.

Thanks again,
James