Bruce Ingham's "Nominal and Verbal Status ..." (fwd)

[Koontz John E]

> Semantically verbs turn into nouns when a shift from "temporary
> occupation" to "permanent state" in meaning occurs ... Grammatically
> the zero-derived nouns stop to be conjugated as active verbs, no
> ablaut alternation occurs, no continuative -hAN enclitic added, and
> perhaps something else.
>
> So I would say that perhaps wauNspe-ya-khiyapi is "you teach him/her",
> and wauNspekhiye he-ni-chapi is "you are teachers". (-e ending in
> Buechel), with this "temp. occupation" vs. "perm. state" opposition
> being clearly salient.

I take it that we mean permanent in terms of permanence of the occupation
for a particular person, and not permanent in terms of lexicalization?

There's something about ablaut grading that I wondered about in connection
with Bruce's analysis.  I think that e-grades vs. a-grades in nouns can be
predicted in terms of something like specificity of reference.  The
e-grade is especially used with possessed things, e.g., s^uN'ka, but
thas^uN'ke (tha-possessed CVC nouns take the -e grade), or c^haNl' ~
chaNte' (body parts with CVC-stems take -e(') in independent form), and
possessed things have a specific, even definite, reference with respect to
the possessor.  One could even perhaps make something of an argument that
this matched singulars (-e, specific) vs. plurals (-a, generic), but it's
not clear in general that this predicts use of e vs. a with verbs
generally or even with nominalizations of verbs.  For example, why would
negatives and diminutives condition -e under this logic?  I'm also not
sure that this assessment would hold up under modern usage.

JEK