Helmbrecht IJAL Paper: Some Semantic and Etymological Quibbles

[Koontz John E]

Johannes Helmbrecht (2002:7) says of Winnebago wa- (which is a pretty
standard pan-Mississippi Valley or even pan-Siouan wa-) that it has three
uses:  '(a) it may be translated as 'something' etymologically deriving
from the indefinite pronoun waz^aN 'something', (b) it functions as a
detransitivizer, and (c)  it may it is the third person plural object
pronoun 'them' of transitive verbs.'

The first and second categories seem essentially the same to me, though
(b) is put in more technical, if more limited, terms.  If I had to take a
stab at it, and I guess we all do, from time to time, I'd say something
like wa- eliminates the patient argument, where patient is to be
understood in Siouan, not universalist terms.  [This last qualification is
something that Carolyn Quintero always points out if I don't.]

We do usually think of wa- as detransitivizing with transitive verbs, but
that doesn't help much with the business of deriving nouns from
intransitive verbs, because if a transitive verb makes a perfectly good
nominal, with or without wa-, as it generally does, it's not clear why a
stative intransitive verb would require detransitivization or even
"patient argument satisfying" to make a noun of it.  And that applies in
spades with active intransitives, of course.

This is where (a) helps, because we can fall back on a notion that wa- is
a morpheme that translates as 'something that ...s' or 'something that is
...' or 'it ...s something', and so on.  I guess we're saying informally
that wa- marks derivations that have 'something' as head?

I've suggested in the past, without really pursuing it, that maybe what
wa- really does is mark a sort of focus or orientation toward a particular
argument.  I think this is really tantamount to 'derivations with
something as head', i.e., "focus" = headedness.  Another way to think of
it is to treat wa- as a sort of incorporated noun.  So rather than wa-
with transitives meaning 'the object is irrelevant - we don't care what it
is' it means 'we know what the object is, so we don't need to mention it
explicitly'.  This is not detransitivization in the sense of eliminating
an argument.  It is detransitivization in the sense of satisfying the
argument from the context.  So when the cryer at an Omaha feast says
wathatHe ga ho 'eat!' he doesn't mean 'eat [anything at all]' or 'engage
in the activity of eating', he means 'eat [the stuff provided]' or 'eat
[this stuff right here]'.  In short, 'something-eat' or 'stuff-eat' not
just 'eat'. And with intransitive verbs rendered into nouns you get '[the
thing that] x-es' or '[the thing that is] x'.

Using some of Lipkind's examples, more or less adapted to modern
orthography:

ruu'c^ 'to eat it' waru'c^ not 'eat' but actually 'eat the food'

dee'x 'to urinate' (also 'urine') wade'x 'bladder', i.e., 'the thing
that urinates'

s^iNiN' 'be fat[ty]', was^iN' 'fat', i.e., 'that which is fatty'

Incidentally, I thought I was being greatly daring in my SACC paper in
putting the accent mark on Winnebago long vowels on the second vowel
character, but I see that Johannes is doing this, too.  I heartily
approve.

----

When Johannes derives wa- from waz^aN' 'something', I htink he's going a
bit far.  Lipkind himself suggests that waz^aN' is from wa- + hiz^aN INDEF
ART.  Actually, we can be pretty sure from the wide distribution of wa- in
Siouan, and the lack of wide distribution of -z^aN or of waz^aN' or even
of hiz^aN' that wa- is just wa-, and waz^aN and hiz^aN are artifacts of
Winnebago (or of Winnebago-Chiwere).  Bob Rankin actually considers that
hiz^aN is connected with the various extended forms of 'one' used in
counting in Mississippi Valley.  It is possible that waz^aN' is derived
from wa- plus z^aN, less likely that it's derived from wa- plus hiz^aN' as
Lipkind suggests.

Johannes also suggests in a footnote that the third function of wa- in
Winnebago, the marking of the third person object with transitive verbs,
is 'a further step in the grammaticalization of this form' and that
comparative Siouan evidence for this needs to be obtained.  In fact, it
has been, though with the usual Siouanist obscurity.  The use of wa- as a
third person patient plural with transitive verbs is general in
Mississippi Valley Siouan, except for Dakotan, where wic^ha- occurs as its
vicar, to borrow a term from ecology (not to mention the Church).

For example:

OP JOD 1890:17.17-18

nikashiNga   enoN=xti    wa'thatHa=    bi=ama
human beings only really they ate them PL QT

they ate nothing but human beings

Here the wa'- is 'them' - it's accented with verbs in th (*r).

It's an interesting question whether the wic^ha- situation in Dakotan
should be seen as an alternative to the wa- situation in Winnebago,
Ioway-Otoe, and Dhegiha, or as a replacement of it.  And on the answer to
this turns a great part of the question of the timing of the extension of
wa- to third person plurals.  I would, however, say that it is an
extension, just as Johannes suggests.  It doesn't occur in this way
outside of Mississippi Valley, not even in Mandan or Tutelo, as far as I
know.  I have the distinct impression that in OP one gets more mileage out
of considering that the category 'third person plural object' is filled
with the wa-form of the verb stem than from considering that there is a
pronominal prefix wa- separate from the 'modal prefix' wa-.  For one
thing, both wa-morphemes engage in the same set of contractions with other
things.  Also, both condition the extraposition of the first person agent,
first person patient, and inclusive agent markers to a position before
wa-, and the morphosyntactic location of both wa-morphemes is the same.

-----

One other note on wa-.  Johannes says (2002:7) that Lipkind doesn't
mention wii- < wa-hi-, i.e., wa- plus the *i-locative.  He certainly
doesn't make much of a deal of it, but it is is mentioned in passing, on
p. 17 in the section Modal Prefix, last paragraph, and on p. 26, in the
section on contractions of prefixes, under '(c) Verbs with the prefix hi
contract:' I can understand how that could be overlooked, as there is no
development of the notion, and as anyone who's used Lipkind knows, the
table of contents of the volume has the form:

Phonology        1
Morphology      12
Text            58
Notes for Text  62

There is no index, everything is excessively concise, the typeface is
horrible, and the orthography somewhat idiosyncratic.  It's not as hard to
work with as Marten's dissertation, however.

Charactersitically for the time, it also has essentially nothing on
syntax, though there is a section on Word Order (three paragraphs, pp.
56-57), so perhaps "Syntax 56" might be added to the table of contents.

JEK