double inflection

[Koontz John E]

On Sun, 3 Aug 2003, Pamela Munro wrote:
> Agreed, absolutely. I should have said that. The same would be true of
> the Siouan forms. That's what makes these so interesting to me. If the
> morphology does not have a long enough base to do its thing it can look
> ahead to inflection and borrow something.
> >
> >What interests me about this case is that it shows grade formation
> >operating in some sense, anyway) after (perosnal) inflection.  That's like
> >the way that dative formation operates after (personal) inflection in
> >Omaha-Ponca.  Theorists generally hold that inflection follows derivation.

I'm not sure if I worded this clearly.  Were you agreeing that it looked
like - in this case - the grade formation process would have to be said to
follow inflection in the process of creation of the form?  That was the
only way I could get the case of the Omaha-Ponca dative to make sense to
me.  In other words, while my instincts agree with my education here, and
I'd expect all derivation to precede all inflection, the grade formation
process you describe here, and at least the case of the OP reduplication of
'to say' look like they require one derivation to follow inflection.

The Omaha-Ponca dative is actually a better example, because it's
pervasive, and not an isolated case, but it could be argued that dative is
an inflectional process, rather than a derivational one, though I think
the instincts of most Siouanists would be that it is derivational, or at
least "stem forming."  The problem in Omaha-Ponca is just that it's
difficult to explain the forms exhibited by applying inflection to the
dative "stem."  In some cases the merger of the locative or pronominal or
sequence of them with gi- seems to skip syllables that precede its
ostensible location.

I haven't been able to come up with any arguments that OP dative is
derivational as opposed to inflectional.  It seems pretty productive, and,
though there are a couple of cases where the English verbs expressing the
base and the dative forms are different - e.g., gaNze/giaNze
'demonstrate/teach', I don't know that these are especially unpreditable
and idiomatic.

JEK