Verb auxiliaries.

[Robert L. Rankin]

I tried to respond to this early today but got cut off.  I hope it isn't a
partial duplicate.  Bob
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> On Mon, 1 Nov 1999, Ardis R Eschenberg wrote:
> The double article dhaN ama is used in partitives.
> JOD1890:443.14  s^aaN'=ama e=d=e=di ama    dhaNz^a
>                 Sioux  the there are there though ...
> The articles agree, if both are present.  ...

> Perhaps this is tangential, but... I am pretty sure that 'ama' used
> there is not an article.  That is, ama serves many functions....

> OK, technically, it isn't an article, but another class of morpheme
> homophonous with them and concordant with them.

These are fully conjugatable in most instances and are only homophones
with articles in the 3rd person.  I gave examples of 1st and 2nd persons
the other day while discussing -he 'to be'.

'animate to be standing'  'be moving'
1sg  a-thaN-he		  a-riN-he
2sg ra-thaN-s^e		 ra-riN-s^-e
3sg    thaN		    riN

With addtional forms for 'be sitting, lying' etc.

These particular auxiliaries are functionally distinct from the -akha/-aWa
set of articles (?) that mark agent in that the latter don't have the full
set of inflection (?). Interestingly they only seem to occur in
Omaha-Ponca, Kansa and Osage.  So they may be a recent characteristic of
Dhegiha that separates Quapaw from the other 4 languages.  In any event,
there is an on-going grammaticaliztion process involving the set of
articles.  I described part of it in that old paper I did in about
1976-77.  It seems to run:

VERB > AUXILIARY > DEMONSTRATIVE > ARTICLE > AUXILIARY (again).

> One cannot be too nutso over Dhegiha article/aux/verbs.

Amen.  The subject needs someone to write a full dissertation on it.

Bob