Dhegiha -akhe.

[Rankin, Robert L]

> Another argument against it is that akha', as a
positional, ought to come *after* the (-i | -bi)
particle if it occurs at the end of the sentence, as
"the" does in the fairly frequent form [Sentence]
bi=the'=ama. I think the examples you cite above
indicate that akhe' functions as a non-ablauting -e
stem verb, however it was derived.

1. "as 'the' does in ... frequent form"  Actually, this
is the "the" that is not historically a positional I
think. It's the one that some linguists have translated
'narrative' and which has the cognate in Hidatsa "rahe"
'rumored'.  John's 2000 Siouan Conf. paper was on
synchronic aspects of this particle and my ICHL paper
last month was on diachronic aspects of it.

2. "non-ablauting -e stem verb"  There are no
non-ablauting -e stems in Dhegiha as far as I know.
Only Dakotan, which has totally restructured the
system, has "non-ablauting -a stems". If you're going
to be at the syntax meeting, I'll distribute my paper
on this there.

> The variation of akha' / akhe' and ama' / ame' is not our standard
verbal ablaut.  These words, as you say, need to be analysed separately.
Unless someone else cares to argue for them, I think we can reject
hypothesis 1 (ablaut) and hypothesis 3 (X akha=i ==> X akhe). This
leaves hypothesis 2 (X akha e ==> X akhe) and hypothesis 4 (X akha, e
akha ==> X akhe).  Bob, did you have another one?

3. Yes, in those instances where 'lying/horizontal'
persons/objects are involved I think the identity of
the /khe/ part of akhe is clearly the reclining
positional, not a derivation from akha. In dealing with
form and meaning, meaning is of equal or greater
importance.

Other than those 3 points, I don't have anything to add
to the discussion because the languages I've worked on
just don't have /akhe/ apparently.

Oh yeah, there was one other thing.  The fact that e ~
ai ~ abi all occur in the texts (or even the same text)
does not mean that they are semantically or
morphologically distinct forms. They may be individual
or simply fast-speech variants of one another much like
some of the plural allomorphs Connie listed for Dakotan
-- "contractions" if you will. This is why additional
field investigation is so important. Dorsey may have
tried to normalize his notation in publications, but he
didn't always understand everything.

Bob