double inflection

[Koontz John E]

On Sun, 3 Aug 2003, Pamela Munro wrote:
> I believe that John is suggesting that the order is
>
> Inflection (person marking: stem-initial y of ya replaced by bl etc.: ya
>  > bla)
> Reduplication (bla > blabla)
>
> Then my guess would be that ablaut (final a > e) follows this, applying
> as usual to the final syllable of the ablauting stem (blabla > blable).

Truthfully I hadn't gotten that far, but this seems reasonable.  In
Dhegiha you get the a-grade in reduplications, anyway - se : sasa; etc.

> Certainly if ablaut came before reduplication, we'd get bleble. Perhaps
> there are very short ablauting verbs that give such a result (I can't
> think of any). But I bet such verbs do not start with y!

I'm thinking I've seen "propagated ablaut" in Hidatsa or maybe Mandan, but
it may have been in obstruent + resonant clusters where it would be
Dorsey's Law-like epenthesis.

I think both yA 'to go' and =yA 'to cause' ablaut.  But we're dealing with
the only reduplication of either (the first) that I know of.  Well, I
guess the root of e=yA 'to say' also ablauts and we have a reduplicaiton
of it now.

> If ablaut is  inflectional, this example shows is that ablaut must a
> later inflectional process than person marking. (This is thus another
> case which in which the two reduplicated elements are less than
> perfectly similar to each other.)

In my analysis of phonological words as consisting of one or more smaller
"morphological" words, given that ablaut is conditioned by one such
morphological word (an enclitic) following another (a verb stem), it would
be natural to have ablaut (within a phonological word) follow inflection
(within a morphological word).  This would also tend to follow under Bob
Rankin's argument (originally made by Wes Jones) that ablaut orignates
from (and can often still be explained as) C(V1)=V2... => C=V2...
collapses across the boundary of two morphological words.  I'm putting
things here in my terms, but clearly my terms are no more than a sort of
reductio ad absurdam of the standard Siouanist position vis-a-vis
enclitics, and a sort of crypto-lexicalist approach to boot.

> I hope this makes sense. I am after all only a closet Siouanist
> wannabe....

Oh, I think you might be out of the closet and fully qualified.

JEK