transitivity, locative prefixes & the pronomin. argument hypothesis.

[Linda Cumberland]

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> I would not call it a voice marker either as I understand the term.
For
> the comparable morpheme in Lakhota and other languages like this I
know
> of, I would consider it essentially a detransitivizer.

I'm curious about the question of a middle voice.  I played around
with the idea a while back to see if it might explain the difference
between 1st sg "waki" and "we" in verbs with "ki" - it seemed to come
close, but in the end, the argument was a bit squishy because there
were several counterexamples to the class I was attempting to
construct.  VanValin (1977) called these "a special form of transitive
verbs which overtly indicates that the Actor possesses the
Patient..analobous to the "middle Voice forms in some Indo-Europesan
languages (47-8), and on p. 58 says "there is another morpheme "ki"
which marks the "middle voice", i.e. the possession of the Patient by
the Actor. Thus "ki-" marks two different kinds of possession in
addition to its semantic roles."

Has anyone else formally pursued this idea?

Lind