Helmbrecht on 'Nouns and Verbs in Hochank (Winnebago)'

[Koontz John E]

I'm probably not the only member of the list who noticed Johannes
Helbrecht's article in IJAL 68.1 on Winnebago parts of speech?  This is,
of course, of general interest to all Siouanists, and, even if the Hochank
have done a very good job of being different I don't think any
non-specialists in Winnebago among us (which would be just about
everybody, sadly) are going to find the details obscure.

Johannes takes of the problem of distinguishing nouns from verbs in
Winnebago, and concludes that 'The semantics of hypothetical noun words
alone is not a reliable way to determine their status.  However, words
that are close to the semantic prototype of nouns are likely to be
classified as nouns in Hochank.  Evidence of their syntactic category must
be found in their morphosyntactic behavior.'

The problem is mainly that nouns have essentially no morphologically
characterizing behavior, and the morphological behavior that characterizes
verbs includes a large number of forms that semantics, or at least analogy
with English and other European languages, would consider to be nouns.
Johannes also specifically points out that independent of the question of
morphological characteristic various forms listed in the available
Winnebago dictionaries are double listed as both nouns and verbs, e.g.,
niNiNha' 'to breathe, to chant' and 'breathing, breath, throat'.
(Incidentally, this (1) and the next example (2) that he lists
accidentally label the v.'s as n.'s and the n's as v.'s.)

You'll probably notice some analogies with the questions that Bruce Ingham
was tackling recently in IJAL for Teton, and also that the answers aren't
always the same in different Siouan languages, though the basic problem is
certainly familiar, namely how do you tell a noun from a verb if

(a) nouns have no nominal morphology

[Verbs have the possobility though not always the necessity of being a bit
better equipped, morphologically.]

(b) roots that feel like nouns can often be used verbally, with no
derivational morphology and precious little inflectional morphology,

and, especially,

(c) it appears to be possible to treat any clause (from a verb root on up
to a multi-word construction) as a noun, usually without any nominalizing
morphology.  It's true that there is often an article or something of that
ilk following the nominalized things, but a little further inspection
generally reveals that this is only there when it's needed to mark
definiteness (or whatever other ilk-iness is relevant).

I have a number of questions and comments on this article, but I think, in
the interest of making any discussion that arises manageable, I'll try to
put them in separate letters.

JEK