Two object pronouns: deReuse, Rood, & Taylor

Constantine Xmelnitski mosind at yahoo.com
Fri Mar 17 18:13:46 UTC 2000


I think that the citation from Willem J. de Reuse's
"Noun Incorporation in Lakota (Siouan)" (IJAL 60(3),
p.249) would be to the point:

   wic^ha 'human'
   wic^ha'k?u ' to give someone to the clan in the
marriage' (NSB, Shirley Murphy, personal
communication, 1983)
   This verb occurs in le' e'l wic^ha'c^hic^?u (Dem
Postp human-S2-A1-give) 'I give you to this one in
marriage' (BD:86). According to Shirley Murphy
(personal communication, 1983), this is really giving
somenone to the clan (technically speaking the band or
thi?o's^paye) in marriage and thus wic^ha'- can be
assumed to be the truncated form for wic^has^a
'person, man', representing not the future husband but
the clan. One might wonder, however, whether wic^ha'-
is not simply the regular plural animate S3 pronoun,
translatable as 'them' and referring also to the clan.
There are two arguments against this analysis. First,
if wic^ha'- was a genuine plural pronoun, it would
have to agree in number with the Demonstrative le'
'this one', which would then have to be plural too:
lena' 'these'. Second, Lakota verbs do not contain
more than two pronominal prefixes. Since c^hi- is a
portmanteau of ni- 'S2' and wa- 'A1', the sequence
wic^ha'-c^hi- would amount to three pronominal
prefixes.

See also D.Rood & A.Taylor "Sketch of Lakhota, a
Siouan Language" about the possibility of two object
pronominal affixes (direct and benefactive):

"Some speakers can inflect verbs for both direct and
benefactive objects, but others reject these forms as
meaningless. (Neither Buechel 1939 nor Boas and
Deloria 1941 mention these paradigms.) The more
complex pattern seems to begin with the benefactive
form, into which are inserted the transitive affixes
appropriate to the nonbenefactive verb. Thus, ‘I'm
looking for them for you’ (verb stem ole') goes from
oc^hi'c^ile to owi'c^hawac^hic^ile. Other speakers use
a paraphrase: owi'c^hale maya's^i c^ha oc^hi'c^ile
‘you told me to look for them so I’m looking for it
for you’."
( http://www.wablenica.newmail.ru/sk2.htm#9383 )



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