double inflection

[Pamela Munro]

John,

Thanks so much for this extremely helpful survey of things I probably
should have known!

Of course this is not directly parallel to what we're looking at, but
it's good to have other nice examples where compounds show double
inflection of any kind. (In English, for example, they generally do not,
with the exception of cases like fixer-uper, which is an unusual case.)

Pam

Koontz John E wrote:

>On Sat, 2 Aug 2003, Pamela Munro wrote:
>
>
>>I'd like to know the current feeling of Siouan specialists about double
>>inflection for subject in verbs like Lakhtoa Ibláble 'I left' (with two
>>-bl- subject markers), which is cited in some theoretical literature on
>>double inflection.
>>
>>...
>>
>>Is there a compound analysis of the Siouan verbs?
>>
>>
>
>A good reference here might be Allan Taylor's survey of the Siouan motion
>verbs, which is in IJAL.  I think the year is (or was) 1976.  There are a
>heck of a lot more compound froms than he lists, at least in individual
>languages, but he covers the core of the motion verb system.
>
>I believe that everyone considers these verbs to be compound (in this
>case, essentially reduplicated) in terms of a historical explanation.  I
>don't know that it would be safe to claim that everyone does this in
>synchronic descriptions.  I'm lamentably out of touch with the current
>(last 20-30 years?) literature on Dakotan morphology, in spite of Trudi
>Patterson and others' attempts to correct that deficiency.  I think
>Trudi's dissertation would be one place to look.
>
>In general terms, Mississippi Valley languages do a lot of compounding of
>motion verbs and positional verbs, both as main verbs and as aspectual
>auxililaries, and in such compounds usually both elements are inflected,
>unless a causative is added to the mix and preempts the lower level
>inflection.  There are also some non-motion lexical verbs that involve
>such compounds.  We've been discussing gaN=dha 'to want', for example, and
>there are a number of others in Dhegiha languages.  Diachronically these
>are often stable, but they do show some tendency to develop into either
>infixing or prefixing verbs with a single inflection.  It's instructive to
>collect descriptions of the paradigm of hiyu from different souces, for
>example.
>
>Apart from essentially lexicalized compound forms like these there are
>also other kinds of double inflection.  Less regular (syncopating)
>paradigms are often supplemented with a set of regular pronominals in
>front of the irregular ones, e.g., modern OP attaNbe, dhas^taNbe, daNba=i,
>aNdaNba=i (A1, A2, A3, A12 of 'see') with a-t-, dha-s^- in first and
>second person.  IO and Winnebago do this pervasively in some paradigms.
>And everywhere the A1P2 portmanteau is almst always added over the A1 form
>of irregular stems, e.g., OP wikkaNbdha 'I desire you' < gaNdha 'to
>desire, wish'.
>
>Auxiliaries in general are usually separately inflected from the main
>verb, e.g., the Crow and Hidatsa future, or in OP that inflected
>positional that follows the future enclitic in many contexts.
>
>The OP negative (all Dhegiha negatives, in fact), has a sort of
>pseudo-inflection that seems to be made up of a fusions of an old
>auxiliary and the plural marker with the negative enclitic.  Certain
>postverbal adverbial enclitics in OP also regularly require an inflected
>auxiliary to "support them," e.g., a-t-taNbe=m(aN)=az^i=xti=m-aN 'I really
>don't see it' in which a-t- and the two m- are first persons.
>
>Finally, in OP and other languages the dative, possessive, and reflexive
>paradigms of syncopating (irregular) stems exhibit a pattern involving
>inflection of both the underlying stem and the derivational prefix, e.g.,
>for gaghe 'to make', the dative is eppaghe, dhes^kaghe, giagha=i,
>iNgagha=i, in which e and dhe are from the regular pronominals a and dha
>with contracted gi, and the underlying stem is also inflected, cf. the
>non-dative forms ppaghe, s^kaghe, gagha=i, aNgagha=i.  In the possessives
>and reflexives the "inside" inflection of the first and second person
>alternates with an additional -k- in the third person.  What you get is
>(reflexive of gaghe, sense 'make for self') akkippaghe, dhakkis^kaghe,
>kkikkagha=i, aNkkikkagha=i.
>
>This is relevant to an idea I've been exploring off and on in Omaha-Ponca,
>though it works for other Mississippi Valley Siouan langauges like
>Dakotan, of seeing verb forms as consisting (potentially, and actually
>pretty frequently in fact) of sequences of lower level forms.  The rules
>of inflection and derivation apply to these lower level forms, though
>derivational processes often compress two lower level forms into a single
>one, e.g., by treating a lower level sequence of preverb and root as a
>single root when some prefixes are added.  This scheme seems to keep me
>from going crazy trying to explain the rules of pronominalization and
>derivation, which is not the case if the compounds and other multi-stem
>forms are treated as single chunks.  It also seems to help in predicting
>accentuation, at least in OP.
>
>I don't know whether this will help with plurals, as plural markers are
>the one thing that Siouan languages seem to feel you need only one of, no
>matter how many things are pluralized.
>
>JEK
>
>
>
>
>

--
----
Pamela Munro
Professor, Department of Linguistics, UCLA
UCLA Box 951543
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543 USA
http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/linguistics/people/munro/munro.htm




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