double inflection

[ROOD DAVID S]

I haven't thought about this theoretically -- conjugational irregularities
don't bother me much when I can see a vague historical justification for
them, and allow for a combination of speakers' ability to analogize and to
memorize as they acquire their language.  People DO know the historical
forms of their language because they memorize them as units.  Below are a
few comments on the historical/etymological facts, however, most of which
you probably already know fully.

For most of the doubly inflected Lakota verbs, there is a clear compound
etymology and inflection of both parts, but there are lots of wrinkles.
Iblable is from iyaya, the compound of i and ya, with the unexpected
reduplication of ya 'go', but the paradigm is not in accord with the
compound analysis.  THe 'start' verbs are all compounds of 'arrive +
move', so this i must be 'arrive going', and historically we would expect
*wa'ible for this form -- but it doesn't happen that way.  A similar i-
initial verb is iyanka 'run' (wa'imnake 'I run'), but the inflection is in
a different place there.  The only candidate I know of for that i- is the
same 'to arrive going', and that doesn't make semantic sense there.
Older records for hiyu 'start coming' conjugate it wahibu, but no one does
that any more as far as I know (today it's wahiyu).  That of course is a
compound of hi and u.  The suus forms of the compound verbs have a further
quirk that's unique to them as far as I know: glicu 'start coming home'
adds an extra -ya- syllable between the parts when there's an inflectional
prefix, so you say both wagliyaku and yagliyaku.  Clearly this is NOT
double inflection, but I have no idea what it is.  Similarly khigla (note
that this one is NOT reduplicated, though it's the compound of the suus
forms of i and ya), is wakhiyagle.  The same -ya- shows up with the a-
prefix that marks collective subject for motion verbs: 'they started for
home here' is agliyaku.  This could be double inflection with epenthetic
/y/, of course, and may be the source of the analogy for the other forms,
but I'm not sure I want to advocate that analysis.
	On the other hand, there are lots of compounds that do not inflect
both parts -- those with the -ya causative and the -shi 'command' come
immedidately to mind, as well as all the nonce (syntactic?) constructions
with motion verbs second and things like eya-lowan '(s)he said, singing',
which I think would be eya-walowan in the first person, though that should
be verfied before being cited.

I don't think this is much help, but it's fun to reveiw these problems
once in a while.

David


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

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.
>
> Although I feel I have a handle on this descriptively I confess that I
> haven't thought further about the best analysis, and perhaps some of you
> have.
>
> Jason Riggle and I are preparing a paper on double plural inflection in
> Pima (a Uto-Aztecan language) where the words in question have clearly
> been analyzed as compounds, with each section receiving its own plural
> marking.
>
> Is there a compound analysis of the Siouan verbs?
>
> Thanks,
> Pam
>
> Pamela Munro, Linguistics, UCLA
>