augmentative/diminutive shifting

[Robert L. Rankin]

> Is there someone out there who has any idea when various
> sound-symbolic shifts in Siouan languages became unproductive- that
> is, lexicalized- in most of the languages?

There's no real evidence that it ever was anything but lexical.  I guess
I've heard that Dakotan speakers can sometimes play games with the
concept.

> Also, family-level cross-linguistic work seems to indicate that most
> of such augmentive/diminutive shifts originate as bound morphology.

Where you find diminutive shift (dental is replaced by palato-alveolar),
it is not affixal nor is it possible to reconstruct a point where it was.

Kansa examples:

dappa 'short' > jappa 'stubby, really short'
doba 'some'   > joba 'a little bit'

Not many examples of this and none reconstructible to proto-Siouan.

Bob