Reduplication

[John P. Boyle]

Jay,

Here come the Siouan answers.  My orginal question is shown with the >> and
john Koontz's answer is the single >.  OP is Omaha-Ponca one of the
Southern Mississippi languages.  Do you have a tree for Siouan so you know
where teh languages fit?  John has a really nice one on his web site at
<http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz/faq/language.htm>.  Let me know if you
have any questions,

John

>On Tue, 5 Jun 2001, John P. Boyle wrote:
>> I was wondering about reduplication and what everyone might be able to tell
>> me about it. Does it exist in all the Siouan languages?  How about Catawba?
>
>I think we had a past thread on this, so it might help to check the
>archives at the LinguistList.  I think reduplication occurs in all the
>Siouan languages, though I'm not positive about Southeastern or Catawban
>without looking.  It certainly occurs throughout Mississippi Valley.  The
>particular scheme of reduplication does differ somewhat from language to
>language, however.  It might be worth looking at other languages in the
>area(s) for this one.  I doubt this is a Siouan feature per se.
>
>> Can both active and stative verbs undergo this process.
>
>In MV, yes.
>
>> What is it used for?
>
>In Dakotan it forms the plural for inanimate subject verbs and has a
>distributive sense 'here and there, repeated instances, etc.' In
>Omaha-Ponca it isn't used for the plural, but it is more or less
>distributive.  I seem to recall that it means 'by Xs' with numerals in
>Dakotan.  It occurs with the motion verb stems in Dakotan - the starting
>out stems?  I really should know that by heart!
>
>In OP it occurs with s^aN 'completely', which I think of as an adverb.  It
>also occurs with 'to say' as in es^es^e 'you keep saying' (vs. es^e 'you
>say'), including the pronominal in the reduplication.  The positionals are
>reduplicated in the iterative auxiliaries.
>
>> In Crow reduplication generally adds the meaning of 'thoroughly,
>> intensely, to a high degree' to the semantics of the unreduplicated stem.
>> Is this the case for the other languages?
>
>Intensives are indicated with enclitics in Omaha-Ponca, e.g., =xti 'very,
>truely', =(s^)na 'exclusively, habitually, usually, only', =att(a)=s^aN
>'right up to, extremely, very'.  See the 'suddenly' threads in the
>archives of the list.
>
>> Has anyone ever done anything on reduplication in any of the
>> languages?
>
>Carter and Shaw's Dakota dissertations.  Boas and Swanton have something
>of a mini-survey for MV (without details) in their Dakota sketch.
>
>> Anything comparative as to what stems undergo reduplication?
>
>I'd say it was mostly pretty productive as a lexical process (grammatical
>maybe in Dakotan), though less common in some of the languages.  There are
>some interactions with stem shape and with ablaut.  It does occur with
>numerals in some cases.
>
>JEK