(not so) Silly terminological question.

[bi1 at soas.ac.uk]

I take David's remark about the difficulty of calling i- a locative.  On
the other hand I have always had a feeling that it is basically a sort
of locative indicating off to one side hence the use as an
instrumental 'held in one hand'.  It does still have that sort of
meaning in some words where it indicates 'colliding with' as in
icah^taka 'to have contact with' iwoto, iwoh^taka, iyapha 'bump
into'.  Even in words like iwaNyaNka 'compare with' one can see
soemthing of putting one thing beside another.  This is all a bit
Andersonian of course as in his Locative deep cases.  It maybe
helps to ease the use of locative to cover what is in most of its
occurrences an instrumental
Bruce

Bob has raised an important issue that needs some thought.  John's
"applicative" answer is ok, except that it also applies to the real
locatives -- adding "a-" or "o-" to a verb often changes its argument
options, just as i- does.  The term "applicative" refers to the function of
the morpheme, not its meaning.  I think Bob is looking for a meaningful
abbreviation that will separate the i- from a- and o- as well as from ka,
yu, ya, etc.

I have always been comfortable with lumping the i-instrumental with the
locatives and remarking that the label doesn't cover the full range of the
forms, but I know others don't like that kind of non-mnemonic labeling.
We could try something like "inst" vs. "instr", I suppose.

David


David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
Campus Box 295
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu

On Tue, 4 Dec 2001, Koontz John E wrote:

> On Tue, 4 Dec 2001, Rankin, Robert L wrote:
> > In interlinear translations I mark these latter as INSTR.  But then what do
> > I do with the former type?  It distributes like the locatives, but it isn't
> > a locative.  Sometimes I've called the "instrumentive", which sounds silly
> > and is confusing to boot.  I'm just revising a paper in which I have to
> > solve this problem.  Anyone have an opinion??
>
> In a general way and in terms of specific use it might be called (an/the)
> applicative, it seems to me.  I can understand that this might not appeal
> to everyone.  It's not an applicative in the purest sense of inducing verb
> (personal) concord, but it does figure in the verb form and it does
> indicate means.  In OP i- can govern an NP complement and is the vicar of
> the uN construction in Dakotan.
>
> I actually think that the i- (or some of the homophones that occupy the
> same slot) does (or do) act as a locative in a general way,
>
> I'm thinking of instances like:
>
> i'/bahaN 'to think'
> i'/dhe 'to talk of, to promise'
>
> but one might also wonder about i- on
>
> a) positionals (idhaN, ithe, ihe), and
>
> b) one of the derived numeral types (i-NUMERAL and we-NUMERAL) - I forget
> which (ordinal?).
>
> Of course, like applicative, locative has narrower and wider meanings.
>
> How about i- in idha- (cf. Da iya-) and udhu (cf. Da iyo-)?
>
>

Dr. Bruce Ingham
Reader in Arabic Linguistic Studies
SOAS