Locative Postpositions

[regina pustet]

On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, ROOD DAVID S wrote:

>
>
> 	There is a contrast between postpositional or "inflectional"
> (suffixal)) -ta and verbal -tu; the verb e'tu means 'to be in/at a
> particular place',

I'm not sure if that -tu suffix is that verbal. It occurs also in forms
such as he'chetu 'so', and leha'Ntu 'now', and in many other adverbs.
Nowadays you usually hear the contracted forms he'chel/he'chen and
leha'Nl/leha'Nn though. This of course does not mean that such adverbs are
not in fact etymologically based on a verb. For instance, the base for
he'chetu should be the copula he'cha.

 and I am not convinced that this stressed "e'" is
> the "neutral" demonstrative root John has talked about; the latter is
> probably extant in ekta 'to/toward', etaN 'from' etc.  I think the
> stressed "e" is the verb root 'be', found in e.g. the so-called
> personal pronouns (miye', niye', unki'yepi) and the definite existential
> verb e' seen in sentences like "He' Robert e'" 'that's Robert'.

I agree. But then we have to consider the fact that verbal e' 'to be' is
semantically very specific -- in contradistinction to the other 'be' verb
he'cha. e' occurs only in identificational predicates like the above, and
when headless relative clauses function as predicate nucleus, as in "he is
the one whole stole my car"; this is, of course, just another
identificational context. e' can also combine with cha to serve as a topic
marker. What these three function have in common is the semantic
denominator of "pointing at", in some sense, and from that, I'd say, it's
just a short way semantically to a demonstrative function. In other words,
John's "neutral demonstrative" e' and David's "verbal" e' might be one and
the same, at least if we go back far enough in language history. I'd also
like to make a connection between e' (whatever type) and the locative
prefix e'- 'at' towards', which occurs, for instance, in e'-gnaka 'to put
(somewhere)' (vs. gna'ka 'to put'). e'- is not listed in the Boas/Delora
grammar as a locative prefix that occupies the same slot as the more
common locative prefixes a-, o-, and i-, if I remember that correctly,
although it certainly does. Though e'- is not particularly productive in
Lakota any more.

 The -l/-n
> marker is, in my opinion, the reduced form of e'tu, not the -ta
> postposition,

I'd also vote for -tu rather than -ta. We still have some postpositons in
Lakota that can be used both in a contracted and in an uncontracted form,
the alternation being -l/-n vs. -tu. An example is aka'Ntu vs.
aka'Nl/aka'Nn 'on top of'.

but I can't give you any good arguments for that assertion.

The pitfall is that stem-final -ta is also regularly reduced to -l in
Lakota. That happens quite a lot in serial verb constructions.
At any rate, I have investigated Lakota postpositions sometime in greater
detail, and my impression is that many of them originate in serial verb
constructions. Very often the element that turns into a postposition later
gets truncted in serial verb chains. A very common process here is that
stem-final -tu or -ta is converted to -l/-n. From that perspective, the
assumption that the postposition e'l originates in the verb e'tu makes a
lot of sense. Since postpositions may grammaticalize into affixes, -l/-n
might be the reduced version of e'l. But, as what I said above implies
already, I'm not quite sure at waht point the assumed -tu element entered
the diachronic scenario. -tu might have been attached to the ancestor of
an element like aka'Ntu/aka'Nl/aka'Nn 'on top of' independently of
anything that might have happened to the combination e' + tu. Which is to
say that only -tu might be involved in the development of -l/-n, not
necessarily e' as well.

> 	I am not aware that modern day speakers use the "thil" form for
> the locative of 'house';

Never heard that either. thil might be just a rapid speech contraction of
thi + el.


Regina Pustet