Obviative/Proximate and the Omaha verb system

[Rankin, Robert L]

> Anyway, the first examples you provide have the sense 'so, in order that',
while the group on p. 23 are the other - more common one, "having,"
what Bob Rankin recently called (I forget where, maybe just conference
comments or email) the "conjunct mode" after a term used in Algonquian
grammar (maybe elsewhere, too) to refer to generically subordinated clauses
(as opposed to specific kinds of subordinates like conditionals, causals,
temporals, etc.).

I recall the discussion, but someone else must have used "conjunct" to
describe it.  My comparison was with the Dakotan article k?uN, and David
pointed out that the use of (this cognate) k?uN was the same as our
description of egaN. It's one of the ways tenseless languages sequence
events.  Historically it is/was kiN 'the' + *?uN 'do/be'. It could be called
a conjuction nowadays.


> Anyway, apart from verbal uses, egaN seems to be used after verbs in
the sense of 'sort of'.  Probably in this sense it seems to be a fixed
part of e=dhe 'to think', which is always e=dh=egaN 'to sorta think'.

In Kaw it can come after lots of things as a modifier. zhuje-ego 'pink' <
'like red'.  si-ego 'meat pie' < 'like a foot'.

>> Also, I should note that statements or clauses ending in one of the
>> words that you call articles, and that I have been calling
dispositionals, and that Paula Ferris Einaudi calls classificatory verbs in
her Grammar of Biloxi, never seem to take -bi, even in the narrative.

Biloxi is quite different in that the positionals are a retention in the
verb system there, as they are in Dakotan and other Siouan subgroups outside
of Dhegiha.  Positionals form something like continuatives in all Siouan
languages and indeed in many other language families as well including
Indo-European. (Spanish/Italian estar/stare, the progressive AUXs, are < PIE
*stan, after all.) In Dhegiha languages, however, these verbs undergo
several stages of grammaticalization. The post verbal positionals are all
derived from the article forms of the old verb roots.  The articles always
combine with -he 'be in a place' (which is conjugated only in the second
person): dhiNk-he 'sitting', k-he 'lying', thaN-he 'standing anim.', dhiN-he
'moving'. So the articles underly all these auxiliaries. Once a verb is
grammaticalized into something like an article (or classifier if you want),
it is not supposed to return to full lexical status, but we weren't there to
warn the speakers that they were violating a universal.

> The closest thing I can think of in English are sentences like "A man
stands tall", or "She is sitting pretty", or "The boy lay sick".
The standing, sitting or lying verb is just slid into a sentence
that would function just fine without them if they were replaced
by a form of "to be", but they add the extra information of the
subject's disposition.

And the -he on the end of each of the articles to derive the AUX of course
IS 'be', as I mentioned above.  I suppose you can think of them historically
as compounds of the positional article and 'locative be'.

> ...it follows that the Ponca dialect at least recognizes -bi and two types
of -i as three distinct morphemes.

I doubt if I can address all the arguments related to this question, and I'm
'WAY behind reading most of the Siouan list messages because of my absence,
but...

In Kaw and Quapaw it doesn't seem to me that there is anything but =abe/=abi
and =awe/=awi respectively. The first member of each pair is female speech.
The phenomenon of reduction to -i in Omaha and Ponca looks to me to be
entirely phonological. Note that this does not mean that speakers could not
have assigned morphemic status to earlier allomorphs though! That is, in OP
there may BE more than one morpheme now. But not in Kaw/Quapaw.

> My conception is that we are dealing with several,
probably three or four, completely different, if not
always adequately distinguished grammatical particles
that come out as -bi or -i in Omaha, and which may have
as many distinct etymological origins. I would speculate
that our problem arises from the collapse of [u] into [i] in OP.

Unfortunately, there are no post-verbal [u"] morphemes in Kaw or Osage that
I can think of. Quapaw merges u and i like OP.

     *bi  - the foregoing is plural, or the
            subject is not defined.

     *bu  - the foregoing is to be taken with
            a grain of salt.

     *u   - the foregoing is a fact.

     *i   - the foregoing took place prior
            to the time that the rest of our
            talk is concerned with.

These are certainly something to look for, but I don't have any "mystery
particles" like these or derivable from these in Kaw or Quapaw.  Carolyn
should speak for Osage.

>As I say, the preceding paragraph is speculative,
so please consider every statement made in it to
be followed by dubitative -bi!

Since I have not really been searching for homophonous '-bi's', I would have
to say the same. But I'm at least skeptical of the polymorphemic solution,
i.e., I would plunk for polysemy, not homophony.  That's not to say that
there isn't more than one *(a)pi in all of Siouan.

Bob