Information / nouns vs. verbs

[Koontz John E]

On Sun, 15 Dec 2002, Linda Cumberland wrote:

> > How would one distinguish in Dakotan languages between 'he went back
> > to his mother's lodge' and 'he went back toward where his mother lives
> > (or lived)'?
>
> My first reaction is to observe that the apparent mis-match in number
> agreement would be evidence:  ‘huNku’ (singular), thipi (plural):
>
>   huNku thipi ekta khi   'he went back toward his mother's lodge'
>
> If you analyze =pi as a nominalizer, there’s no mis-match.

OK, this makes sense.  It wouldn't work very well in Dhegiha, but it makes
sense in Dakotan.  I'm embarassed not to have seen it!

> On the other hand, we have an example from the same text where a
> character says, “ina owiNchakiciyaga” where the literal
> translations of ina ‘mother’ and wiNcha ‘them’ don’t agree -
> it’s untranslatable unless you read “ina” as meaning “my
> mother’s people”: ‘tell(-them) my mother’s people for me’
> (female speaking: Assiniboine lacks a female imperative enclitic).

This intepretation is consistent with the idea that =pi is really an
augment marker meaning "and others" and not a pluralizer - a mark
indicating that there are more than one of whatever it is.

> Maybe I’m oversimplifying, but the whole non-verb question, at least
> in Assiniboine and its close relatives, seems to me to be handled in
> the syntax - the position determines the grammatical class within the
> clause, and the position in the clause determines whether the lexical
> item may be inflected or not.

I agree with this.  Things can be morphologically verbal - verbal
inflection, certain derivational markers, etc. - or morphological nominal
- occasional possessive inflection, no or very limited derivational
patterns - and they can also be applied verbally or nominally, indendently
of their morphological class.  Morphological nouns that are applied
verbally (predicatively) may become morphological verbs - inflectable - or
may not, in which case they have only third persons.  Morphological verbs
that are applied nominally may become uninflectable, in which case they
may become possessible (sometimes not), or they may remain inflectable -
'that which I cut with by pushing' = 'my saw'.  Syntactic environments
allow us to see nominal applications of morphological verbs and vice
versa, but the applications can exist outside of syntactic environments,
e.g., "Q.  How do you say 'saw'?  A.  That which he cuts with."