ordering of person markers

[Shannon West]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu
> [mailto:owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu]On Behalf Of ROOD DAVID S
> Sent: September 30, 2002 11:51 AM
> To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
> Subject: ordering of person markers
>
>
>
> Shannon,
> 	I don't know how you will get this to be accepted by the
> theoreticians, but the real facts about Lakhota person markers are that
> they occur in the order in which they were historically added to the verb.
> Thus wa/ya are closest to the verb, and exhibit a lot of phonological
> reductions.  Next to the left come ma/ni; to the left of that comes uNk,
> and to the left of that comes wicha.  Whether uNk is treated as
> subject or object depends on what it occurs with, not its sequence in
> the string.  It's the affix, not its role, that has an ordering
> constraint.
> With the double statives, the SOV order used for the rest of the language
> seems to be adopted.
> 	I know that isn't going to fit into a tree very well.

I know that this is the diachronic explanation, but that doesn't offer a
synchronic explanation. The speakers of the language don't know the
historical background, and can't use that to figure out which positions
these affixes appear. Your diachronic explanation would have to be fitted
with a templatic account. I don't so much mind templates, but they're not
exactly popular right now, if you know what I mean. Right now, the general
feeling is that there should be rules that the learner can use to figure out
where things go rather than templates to learn.

The SOV order isn't fixed for the double statives in my data, but I do need
to check this out again.

Shannon