Bipartite structure

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 10 Jan 2002 Zylogy at aol.com wrote:
> Instrument-left bipartitism has its greatest flowering near the verb-initial
> zone in the Northwest- the farther you go away the fewer prefixes there tend
> to be. What's left tends to be quite lexicalized. Those interesting
> spatial-distributive suffixes in Muskogean are possibly the remnants of a
> suffixal location/pathway system (and the prefixes- what is the relation to
> bodypart systems?). More please! And thanks!

It may be somewhat misleading to consider the Siouan cases of prefixal
instruments, bipartite or otherwise, as peripheral to the NW.  Siouanists
tend to feel that the present westerly extension of the family is
relatively late.  All of the Siouan parts of the Siouan-Catawban family
have the instrumentals, including Southeastern/Ohio Valley.

The shape/path components in Siouan tend to be suffixal, too, because they
are embodied in NP and sentence/VP-final article and auxiliary systems.
For example, in Dhegiha, the continuative or progressive auxiliaries are
close to being homophonous with the definite articles.  In Omaha-Ponca
they are the same, though more frequently in inflected contexts (when
inflectable) as auxiliaries.  In Osage the paradigms have been filled out
with additional forms drawn from the current positional verbs and the
motion verbs in their uses as auxiliaries, so that the two systems are not
the same in detail.  In addition, there are some differences in the
article system itself, between Omaha-Ponca and Osage and other more
southerly Dhegiha langages.

In addition, the Dhegiha "suddenly/frequently"  (momentaneous / inceptive
/ iterative) auxiliaries, which contain path as well as shape elements,
also follow the main verb and agree with it in transitive active
inflection. There is a suffixal auxiliary in Crow which very much
resembles a fragment of one of these stems.  We've discussed these before,
so I'll refer those interested to the archives.