A Metaphorical Suggestion

[Ardis R Eschenberg]

In my dissertation, I describe and believe I have evidence for the
explanation between ama being used with motion involving a scene shift
while akHa is used with motion in the same general setting.  I gave a few
examples of this in my Colorado talk.  It can be thought of as marked
motion vs. unmarked motion. Similarly, akHa tends to be used when number
is evident from other words/morphemes and ama is used itself to mark
plural number (when there are no other markers such as an overt number).
This can also be thought of as marked and unmarked.  I'm in the thick of
this chapter right now.  My evidence is both from Dorsey and my own stuff.
On another topic...
What are the dates for Spearfish?  I'm sorry, I can;t seem to find where I
wrote them down (if I did).
Regards,
Ardis

On Wed, 20 Mar 2002, Catherine Rudin/HU/AC/WSC wrote:

>
> John -- I'm looking forward to seeing your results on akha/ama in texts --
> maybe we'll finally put one or two of these questions to rest!     Just a
> side comment on plural references with akha.  We did look at some instances
> of akha with plural at the Niskidhe meeting, and I've got plenty of them in
> my recorded texts too, but as far as I remember most if not all of them
> have an explicit number, which might make a difference.  I mean phrases
> like "wa'u naNba akha" (the two women), where naNba makes it very
> explicitly plural...
> Catherine
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> It does seem clear that most plural references are ama, if perhaps not all
> - I haven't relocated any akha plural examples.  But, as everybody has
> been noticing all along and not pursuing, there's something fishy about
> the ama-singular => moving equation, because you can have two closely
> positioned cases of NP ama V-MOTION and NP akha V-MOTION.  I thought about
> motion verbs implying motion if they were verbs of arrival, but both of
> the verbs in question were arrival verbs, I believe.  One case I noticed
> introduced Rabbit (ama) living with his grandmother (akha).
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> The approach that always occurs to me in cases like this is to handle the
> text as a series of sentences reduced, say, to the NPs, with identity
> tracking numbers attached to the NPs.  The question is how much other
> information needs to be included.  In the past I've always ended up
> including so much that I decided the project was too much work just now.
> This time I've decided to try just the NPs - ignoring even things like
> whether the predicate is a verb of motion or there is a pronominal (in
> verb) (often a third person nil) reference to the NP in a clause, though I
> suspect both of these might be relevant.  The problem is that Omaha piles
> up predicates so readily that you can end up with several of these A3
> and/or P3 references to an NP in a clause.  You end up spending all your
> time locating these "zero references," and none of it looking at NPs.
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> JEK
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