Help with a Nahuatl word

[Alan King]

It is true that IF tlaxcaloa could be used as a
transitive verb (as well as an intransitive, since the
latter use is undeniably attested), then that would
license reflexive use...

In Pipil, I have long noticed (in an independent
context) the fact that there are some verbs which, as
shown by the corpus, can be both intransitive and
transitive. I haven't seen this issue covered in our
(very scanty) Pipil linguistic literature and am not
even sure what to call them, so I occasionally refer
to these verbs as "semitransitives". Potentially any
of these could take reflexive "mu-" given their
ability to function as transitives.

Which are the semitransitive verbs? Since I'm
identifying them mainly on the basis of a corpus, only
those which happen to occur in BOTH intransitive and
transitive forms IN the corpus can be empirically
identified, so such identification is partly down to
chance and necessarily incomplete, but we can
extrapolate from such attested cases and posit some
generalisations. Some caveats are in order: correct
identification also depends critically on the
assumption being correct that none of the forms used
as crucial evidence is a sporadic speaker error, a
performance error or a mis-hearing, bad transcription
etc., and it is also ideal if both intransitive and
transitive uses are exemplified by speakers from the
same town, or better yet, the same speaker, to rule
out dialectal or idiolectal variation as the
explanation (although the alternation would still be
valid on the cross-dialectal/idiolectal level!). Now
this is being very picky for a modest corpus the size
of the one available for Pipil Nawat... 

With these caveats, "semitransitive" verbs would seem
to belong to one of the following categories:

1) The well-known case of a(j)si "intr. arrive, tr.
find" - seems to be a one-off.

2) Perhaps some incorporating verbs in which the root
verb is lexically transitive - difficult to find
clearcut examples. A possible example: 

yujyul(u)maka
- intr. (attested in Cuisnahuat) "worry, wonder, think
to oneself"
- tr. (attested in Izalco) "cherish, show love for"

3) A larger number of verbs having the ta- prefix
(i.e. indefinite-object "tla-"), at least
etymologically when this is not synchronically
transparent, or at any rate beginning with the
phonemic material t-, ta- or taj- even though the
"tla-" etymology of some of these is doubtful; and
also the occasional verb in te-. A few examples:

ta(y)i "clean ground" (synchronically unanalysable)
tajkwilua "write" (*ijkwilua is nowhere attested in
the corpus)
tajpia "guard, care for" (cf. pia "have")
ta(l)kulia "regalar, give, provide, offer up"
(synchronically unanalysable)
tashtaw(i)a "pay (for)" (synchronically unanalysable)
tawilua "give light, illuminate" (cf. tawil "lamp,
light")
temaka "give away/over, surrender, sacrifice" (cf.
maka "give")
tisi "moler" (synchronically unanalysable)

This is a rather mixed bag. The example listed here
showing the closest analogy to "taxcaloa" would be
"tawilua". An intransitive and a transitive occurrence
from the corpus follow:

INTRANSITIVE
yaja kwika se itawil wan TAWILUA yawi
"she takes a lamp and goes along lighting the way"

TRANSITIVE
keman kitak ka yawi se tawil shushuik KITAWILUA se
mikini, ne takat mumutij
"when he saw that there was a green (or blue?) light
illuminating the cadaver, the man was scared"

Clearly from the latter example one could derive by
"transformation":

Ne mikini MUTAWILUA iwan se tawil shushuik.
"The cadaver is illuminated by a green light."

I don't know whether there is a similar phenomenon in
Mexican/Classical Nahuatl, and whether this issue is
covered by existing descriptions.


      

_______________________________________________
Nahuatl mailing list
Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl