More case alignment.

[Robert L. Rankin]

Hi,

In case anyone is interested, I just noticed something interesting about
the Winnebago forms I mentioned earlier. They were verbs of 'falling' that
took stative pronominal prefix sets.  Two of the three of them (at least) 
are lexicalized causatives.  This would certainly explain the patient
pronouns -- historically, they were objects, not subjects.  So if you get
interested in this little problem (as  hope you will), causatives are an
obvious thing to watch out for.  (I already mentioned the instrumental
prefixes that have this function when used with stative roots.)  

For the historical linguists among us though, the Winnebago case is
interesting because the causative that is frozen to the verb root 'fall'
is *not* the productive causative in the language today.  Thus, there
really has been morphosyntactic change in Winnebago (and probably Chiwere
too), and these verbs are now real stative verbs.  

Examples from Ken Miner's dictionary: (~ = nasal V or palatal n) (hi~- is
the 1sg patient pronoun.)

ka~a~n~e	'fall over' (from *ka~a~ + re)
hi~-ka~n~e	'I fell over'
hi~-ka~ yaate	'I'm falling over'

siibre		'fall down, be fallen down' (from siip + re)
hi~-sibre	'I fall down'

siipagishewe	'keep falling down in weakness when running in fear'
siipa~-i~-gishewe  'I keep falling, etc.'

The Proto-Siouan causative was *hi_re, where person marking is inserted
before the -re, and where the /r/ of -re is, in fact, epenthetic (to break
up vowel clusters among prefixes).  The causative should be looked upon as
an AUX postposed to the main verb. (Dakotan -ya, Osage -dhe, Quapaw, -de,
Kansa -ye, Omaha/Ponca -dhe.) 

In Chiwere and Winnebago, as opposed to the rest of Mississippi Valley
Siouan, the productive causative is hi-, and the -re has been lost. EXCEPT
that it is retained in numerous lexicalized cases as a kind of bleached
out root extension.  The -re is no longer conjugated in these instances;
only the productive causative, hi-, is conjugated in CH and WI.

In the verb 'to keep falling down in weakness when running in fear' it is
possible that the -we portion is an allomorph of -re, but I cannot prove
that since I don't know enough WI morphology/phonology.  These are nice
examples of how remodeling of the Chiwere-Winnebago causative has caused a
shift in surface case alignment, since the patient pronouns are retained
as functional subjects even though the old causative suffix has been
reinterpreted as part of the verb stem. 

Bob