Bipartite structure

[Jess Tauber]

Thank you, John. Just looking at what you wrote about the semantic ranges of
the outer and inner instrumental sets (though a rather short list, so hard to
prove in any statistical sense) leads me, impressionistically, to posit that
perhaps the inner set is more "about" direct actions of body versus the
mediated or body-external actions encoded prototypically by the outer set
(except where historically shifted- but I wonder about "foot" in that I've
found that different zones of the body in various language families are more
external than others- specifically the feet and lower body versus the upper
body- the upper body prototypically dealing with incoming events, the lower
outgoing).

In Yahgan, the general trend is for instrument prefixes to be themselves
breakable into a generic initial (gross force source name- strike, squeeze,
pull, tread, weight, blow, throw, etc.) followed by a specifier (a spatial
distributive- into multiple bits, short or long lengths, slabs, spheres,
etc.). I suppose one might call these latter incorporated shape classifiers
or some such- they are apparently state-naming.

Following is another assembly consisting of a main verb root followed by a
pathway/location affix. Any one, two, or three of the four elements can be
absent, and in addition the specifier slot can contain at least two items for
even more specificity.

I don't get any direct sense that there is anything like an inner/outer
instrumental split -is there some relation having to do with control?? Outer
instruments in Siouan seem inanimate (biologically) though animated
energywise (impersonal). Iconic?- outer force source versus inner
(egocentrically) placed similarly relative to the verb, and nominal versus
verbals precursors relevant iconically too?

Reanalysis of nom-postp stem to nom postp-stem feels right- does this
possibly mean that the parent language was originally dep-marked? Most of the
bipartite languages with richer affixation are dep-marking to some extent
(and those with apparent ancient fossil bipartitism, such as can be seen in
Salishan, for instance, have gone heavily head-marking). Constituent order
link too- think about it.

Anyway, please forgive whatever above may sound like babble- still trying to
work out all the possibilities. Having inflection anciently on both inner
instrument and main verb sounds promising, since I've been promoting the
notion (yet to be proven) that these constructions originate in something
like serialization. More, please!

Thanks,
Jess Tauber
zylogy at aol.com