postural verbs, verbs of motion

[Jess Tauber]

Here I am to pick your brains again- I'm learning a lot and thanks to
everyone who responded to my last query about instruments and locational
terms.

Bernd Heine has asked me to assemble (finally) my scattered notes on various
structured closed class lexical sets which demonstrate how they interact- one
set often feeding another (such as pronouns and distance demonstratives,
numerals, etc.) and apparently creating some sort of "field" effect whereby
consistency of point-of-view or vantage is maintained.

Anyway, I wanted to get some more info to facilitate this. I have access to a
number of materials on hand, as well as more at my local university library
(though its an 80 mile trip in each direction).

Boas, in one of his papers on Dakota lists yuNka 'lie" and yaNka "sit". Now
just from what I know about postural verbs in various languages these would
seem to be constructs, with input from u- and a- locational affixes. Does
this sound plausible?
One would expect a further *yiNka "stand" if this were the case to at least
be theoretically possible.

I'm no Greenbergian, but close examination of these sets of terms in related
and familially unrelated languages does show clearly that something is going
on, and may well point to something along macro-lumper lines, assuming we're
not talking about universal sound symbolic templates or something like that,
which I sincerely doubt work for nonexpressive forms anyway.

Noncognition between groups appears to some extent to be conditioned by
having choices from which to draw from when creating smaller sets of terms-
for instance, the term for generic "lie" has to choose from lying with
various more detailed postural information- prone, supine, extended or curled
up, in a lump, etc. Similarly for sitting and standing. When you start to
take these more extensive choice sets into account, inter-family cognition
starts to look much better. Perhaps there is a hierarchy to it all.

One of the things I haven't been able to track down in the several grammars I
own are terms for "other/another". In many American languages these are
transparently similar to terms for 1 or 2, 1st or 2nd person, etc.  In Yahgan
"other" also means "self". Nice economy- would be very interesting
theoretically to find out how universal it might be and what the choices of
alignment are- are they symmetrical? Do they also include non-1/2 persons,
numerals, more diverse sets of distance demonstratives, etc.?  What I've got
so far seems to hint that bits and pieces can be missing from any given set-
that you need to expand out to see the big picture.

Unfortunately that also smacks of mass comparison- maybe though there is
something to it (there are chess programs that assume a bigger underlying
board than just the playing field of the particular game- something also in
physics with symmetry breaking, etc.).

So does anyone have any data on "other/another" in Siouan? Yuchi would be
good too (Wagner doesn't have it that I could see).  Thanks.

Best,
Jess Tauber
zylogy at aol.com