Wa Prefix

[Koontz John E]

This is something that I've been wondering about since Carolyn Quintero
showed Bob, David, and me some anomalous Osage wa examples.  I don't
remember those examples (would I did), and I don't always remember my
reaction to them, but I do today (I think), and I'd like to plop it down
on the table in case it might be of use.  

Traditionally, wa- is regarded a detransitivizer.  This has the effect (on
grammarians, anyway) of focussing our attention on the object.  It's as if
there were a little balloon saying "Look, it's gone!" with an arrow
pointing to the object slot, which is empty, but radiating a faint glow.

What I wondered was if this wasn't sort of an inside out understanding of
what wa was doing.  Maybe it's a subject salience marker, instead. 
Naturally, if your attention is focussed on the subject, you are quite
free to omit the object, maybe obliged to, in some languages.  But, in
this case the faint glow is transferred to the subject, and the balloon,
if present, is pointing to the subject and saying "Please notice this!"

And, in this case, we could make sense of things like wa with
intransitives, e.g., wasabe (Omaha-Ponca for 'black bear') is 'the
CREATURE that's black' or maybe 'the one that's BLACK' as opposed to 'a
BLACK thing' or 'something BLACK'. And we could also make sense of wa
tending to occur with agentive or instrumental nominal uses of transitive
verbs (waba'se 'a saw' in OP), or of wa appearing with an object, or other
anomalies of this sort, to the extent that they may be attested. 
Occurring with an object might tend to explain why wa- appears in Dhegiha
and Chiwere as a third person plural object marker, since third person
plural marking is a notoriously correlated with lack of salience.  Usually
what happens is that a third person plural marker gets concerted into a
non-salience marker (e.g., third person plural subject => passive), but in
this case it would be the opposite. 

The two ideas, detransitizer and subject salience marker, are not too
different in some ways, and they have a lot of overlap in terms of
contexts of usage, but they are different, and lead to subtly different
expectations regarding contexts of usage.  

JEK