Outer instrumentals.

[Rankin, Robert L]

>Question: is it possible that the inner/outer opposition is an
innovation in Mississippi Valley languages?

The evidence is messy.  My analysis is still that the outer instrumentals
were indeed grammaticalized later than their inner counterparts. Then, the
languages in which they're all "inner" placed them with the main inner set
by analogy.

BUT there is no complete uniformity in the outer set.  Ordinarily in
Mississippi Valley languages they are *Wo- 'by shooting', *WaN- 'by blade'
and *aRa:- 'by extreme temperature (hot or cold)'. (Dakotan includes na- 'by
foot' in the outer set, probably from confusion with homophonous 'by extreme
temp.', but that's an anomaly.)

*Wo- 'by shooting' is found only in Mississippi Valley languages.
Personally, I would derive it from older *wa-?o: 'to shoot at and hit
something' that was in serial construction with another verb.  Ordinary
phonology would then give us the "funny W+o" we need here.

*WaN- 'by bladed instrument' is found in the same MVS languages plus Mandan.
I can't suggest quite as good an etymology for this one, but perhaps it is
again *wa- 'indef. obj.' used with the same root that we reconstruct for
'chert, flint, knife', namely *waN-.  *waN would have to occur as a verb
root in order to be used with this prefix however.  Nevertheless, phonology
would again give us the "funny W" we want here.

*aRa:- 'by extreme temp.' is found in all the Siouan languages as far as I
can tell, but it has other idiosyncracies, at least in the languages I know
about.  It causes the verb to be conjugated with the stative pronoun set.
And in Dhegiha languages, it often has fused with the following verb stem in
such a way that other, inner instrumentals can be added in front of it.
Thus it is the only instrumental that appears to be compounded with
additional instrumentals (sometimes).

In sum, I think Randy is mostly right in that the outer set tends to be more
transparent etymologically and probably arose from more recent serial
constructions.

AS I recall, Giulia Oliverio has a conference paper she did on these that
may go into greater detail.  I don't know if she ever published it or not.

Bob