Mixed stative.

[R. Rankin]

These are certainly interesting.  It might be informative to return to them after several months had passed and see if the same distribution emerges, or, alternatively, if it emerges only in certain semantic contexts.

'Die' is, I think, more systematic in that several people mentioned to me at the Siouan Conference where I did the talk on statives across Siouan, that t?e/a could be either active "X is dying" or stative "X is dead".  There was an animated discussion going on until the Navajo wife of one of the participants remarked that she didn't like all the talk of death.  We all stopped in deference to her feeling.  Siouan traditional stories are full of death and dying, but apparently not so with the Navajos....  For another "fluid" verb you might try 'fall' vs. 'drop to the ground' (both referring to humans).  I seem to recall Miner telling me that it was variable in Ho Chunk/Winnebago.  Generally though, verbs in Siouan tend to be one or the other consistently.

Bob

>We seem to have elicited a couple more of these from our Omaha speakers.
In my class notes, I have:

  ashka'de      I play
  dhishkade     you play
  shka'de       s/he plays
  oNshka'de     we play

I also find:

  niu'woN       swim
  niu'awoN      I swim
  dhini'uwoN    you swim

In these two examples, the dhi- could be the emphatic/independent pronoun
rather than the affixed you-object pronoun.  That would seem especially
likely in the "swim" case.  But compare the word for "crawl", which seems
to be entirely stative(!):

  mide'         crawl
  oN'mide       I crawl
  dhi'mide      you crawl

I don't know if I have the accent correct on the last two.  Perhaps they
had to emphasize the first syllable to convince me that that was what
they really meant!

Also, what about the word for die/dead?  We have two separate words for
this in our language, but they seem to handle the distinction by treating
the same word as either active or stative, don't they?

  at?e'         I die
  oNt?e'        I am dead

(The above two are going off memory/supposition!)

Rory