ordering of person markers

[ROOD DAVID S]

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").

Grrrr.




David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu

On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, Shannon West wrote:

>
>
> > -----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
>