'Compound' vs. 'simple' CJ prepositions?

[Dave Robertson]

Tlus son,

Mike Cleven brings up a good question.  When I wrote "kikuli kopa brich" as a _Kamloops Wawa_ CJ translation of "under the bridge", couldn't I have just left out the generic preposition "kopa"?  Wasn't it redundant, after all, once I used "kikuli" (= "under")?

In most varieties of Chinook Jargon that I've come across in documents,
there's very nearly free variation between what I'll call 'simple'
prepositions (like "kikuli", "sahali", "inatai" [respectively "under;
above; across"] in _KW_) on the one hand, and 'compound' ones (like "kikuli
kopa", "sahali kopa", "inatai kopa") on the other.  There's little or no
detectable difference between the two usages.  (As for Grand Ronde usage,
I'm intrigued to know Henry Z.'s and Tony J.'s sense of this issue.)


I can imagine a useful distinction being made between "kikuli kopa" and
"kikuli".  It might be, for example, one in which the former is explicitly
prepositional, and the latter a potential ambiguity (either prepositional or serving as an adjective "low/short").

But at the moment I can't say that I've found evidence that such a
purposeful differentiation was ever made.

I'm reminded of various prepositions in Spanish, for example.  There, I
believe you'll find pairs like "BAJO la puente"/"DEBAJO DE la puente",
where, ignoring any semantic differences between these prepositions, it
might be said that BAJO 'feels as though' it stands alone, whereas DEBAJO  'feels as though' it needs to be followed by the additional preposition DE.  (Apologies for my dilettantish understanding of Spanish.)

Allow me to raise an additional speculation in this regard.  Perhaps prepositional usage in the native French of Father Le Jeune (essentially the sole producer of _Kamloops Wawa_) had some influence on his choices of "kikuli" vs. "kikuli kopa", and so forth.  Here, too, however, I'll have to defer to those who knowledge of French is greater than mine.  And if there should turn out to be any parallel here with structures from the Salishan languages (prominently Shuswap, Thompson, Lillooet) spoken in _KW's_ core region of circulation, I'll be interested to hear the judgments of people who know those languages well -- but in Interior Salishan generally, I believe prepositional/oblique marking to work in some rather different ways from that of Chinook Jargon.

A parallel phenomenon to the one discussed above:  In many instances in _Kamloops Wawa_ and elsewhere, you’ll also find the preposition “kopa” used where you might expect no preposition at all!  (And sure enough, you’ll often find it varying freely with ‘zero’.)  For examples:  “wawa kopa naika” / “wawa naika”, both meaning “tell me”; “mamuk komtaks kopa nsaika” meaning “let us know” – where it would be equally understandable to say “mamuk komtaks nsaika”.

Dave

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