ordering of person markers

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, ROOD DAVID S wrote:
> See Bob's Soapbox Address.  The synchronic explanation IS the diachronic
> one -- that's the order that speakers learn and use.  Templates may not be
> popular, but they are what people do!!  I'm convinced that these things
> are memorized as chunks (wichun 'we-them', chi 'I-you"), etc., even in
> English, where 'you and I' is learned as a unit and I is no longer
> declinable ("for you and I" is used by speakers who would never say "for I").

In this sense templates cover the rules I was thinking of, too, and I
agree that they help explain cases like 'for you and I' or embedding
between verbs and satelite particles, etc.

One difficulty with trying to reduce Dakotan pronominal ordering to a
general principle, even ignoring two-patient verbs, and abstracting the
far more critical and determining issue of where particular pronominals
go, is that the existance of chunks like c^hi defeats even the possibility
of meaningful generalizations.  How can we call first > second a general
principle if it's supported by maNya and c^hi or maNya and uN(k)(...)ya.
One can only call c^hi a case of 1 > 2 on diachronic grounds entirely
inobvious within Dakota.  And uN(k) and maN are a fairly dubious semantic
class, and certainly not a morphosyntactic one. Really there isn't enough
data to make any generalizations.

Another lovely OP example:  the I > you form for dh-stems (y-stems in
Dakota) is wi-b-, as in wi-b-dhithe 'I touched you' (sorry - an example
considered obscene, but the best I could come up with from memory). I
suppose wi-b-dhaxube 'I spoke of you as mysterious' might work, though
it's also a bit unusual.  Historically this is something like
*w-(y)i-w-r... with a repeated first person.  But repeated pronominals
(and multiple ones, on old and current serial verbs, and on verbs and
enclitic auxiliaries) are common in Siouan morphologies.

JEK