Citation forms in Prefixing Languages (Re: [Lexicog] part of speech for phrases)

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, Chinedu Uchechukwu wrote:

> Ron, John and Rhodes,
> I found your discussion has been very interesting, as it touches on
> some of the issues that I am presently preoccupied with. ...

Ron's response to Chinedu's (if that would be appropriate) interesting
exegesis is more to the point than anything I could provide, but these are
both serious difficulties, and they do affect compilers of Siouan
dictionaries, though not so seriously as in Igbo.  In Siouan languages
there are usually very limited numbers of quite productive derivational
prefixes, and so, if we alphabetize from the left (which we do), there is
a remarkable pile up under certain letter sequences.  However, (prefixal)
incorporation of noun and verb roots into other verbs, compounding of
unprefixed forms, and the common occurrence of bare roots as verb (and
noun) stems serve to scatter things out a bit, so that, fortunately, we do
not approach the extreme of all verbs beginning with one of two vowels!

My impression also is that in the Siouan cases indexing by roots would not
work for most speakers as the prefixation that occurs in citation forms is
derivational, not inflectional, and individuals may not be able to parse
out the root, or would find it at least somewhat unnatural as a process.
Maybe not as unnatural as looking up English concise under -cise would be
for an English speaker, but far less natural perhaps that looking up iri
under -ri (pardon the loss of tone marking) seems like it might be to an
Igbo speaker - if I understand Chinedu's views of the matter.

Root indexes are very helpful to advanced students of the languages, of
course, and it might be desirable to included them within more complete
lexical work in some way, as appendices, or in-line, perhaps as folded
forms, e.g., -se, we'ba 'cut' and/or -base, we' 'cut by pushing' might be
included to serve as implicit cross reference to we'base n. (b-stem VPoss)
'saw'.  It seems to me that -i'base, wa 'cut with by pushing' would be
harder to justify, though it does enter into the etymology of we'base.
This sort of consideration does introduce the classical problem of how
much repetition of forms and detail is desirable and/or feasible in a
printed work.

Siouan languages lack infinitives or infinitive marking, and the citation
forms used are mainly the bare stem, which is an unadorned third person
singular and/or an imperative.  Unfortunately, the least marked form of
the third person (in contextual terms) sometimes requires an enclitic, and
the imperative usually does, too.  However, bare forms do occur in
subordinated syntactic contexts.  In my rather limited experience,
speakers of a language are less happy with citation forms that cannot
stand alone as a surface form in fairly unmarked context.  Even when these
work remarkably better than any of the available surface forms.

le issue with root forms is that it is my understanding that in some
languages, e.g., Caddoan languages like Wichita, the morphophonemics of
mandatory verb prefixation are such that in the case of some stems it is
difficult to come at an initial segment for use in root indexes (or folded
forms).

JEK



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