Lakota wa- 'variety object'

[R. Rankin]

Hi Regina,

These are interesting and vexed questions.  I
imagine others will have a variety of things to
say about them.  Unfortunately Dakotan is one of
the few Siouan languages where it is possible to
really experiment with these concepts.  My
impression from your examples is that your
evidence tends to support David's notion that wa-
is really a valence-changing device rather than a
prefix that marks a direct object that is simply
non-specific.  In other words, the "variety"
translations are speakers' attempts to somehow
convey the fact that these verb forms are actually
INtransitive.   Wa- is just a detransitivizer in
these examples.  This means that, in the sentences
with an incorporated thi 'house' and also the
detransitivizing wa-, you don't have two
objects -- rather you have NO objects.
Incorporated nouns can't serve as arguments of the
verb, and wa- confirms that the verb is
intransitive.  This is relatively close to what we
get in English with the answer to the question
"What did you spend yesterday doing?"  Answer: "I
was house-painting."  'House' isn't the object;
the verb is intransitive.  We can't say *"I
house-painted yesterday", but in Siouan you can.
And "I house-painted" is different in transitivity
from "I painted a/the house."

The translations with "all over" or "different
kinds of" are a bit misleading.  The Dakotan form
there, it seems to me, is just "I plate-painted."
or "I house-painted."  The "in many places" or
"different kinds of" meaning may be implied, but
it is not stated, since the V is simply
intransitive.

> (a) Does a distinction between a marker for
"plain" non-specific object vs. a similar or
identical marker for variety object surface in
other Siouan languages as well? What are the exact
semantic functions of the equivalent of *wa-* in
other Siouan languages? Are there Siouan languages
in which the etymological equivalent of Lakota
*wa-* functions to code the notion of variety
object only?

In most Siouan languages there is more than one
prefix with the shape WA-.  We will need to be
careful with our examples here.  Luckily in
Dakotan there is no 1st plural object prefix with
that form, as there is in Dhegiha.  Some of the
prefixes may have vowel length distinctions too.

> (b) On the assumption that the two meanings of
Lakota *wa-* ("plain" non-specific object vs.
'variety object') are historically connected,
which meaning is older? Grammaticalization theory,
via the concept of semantic bleaching, would
predict that the meaning 'variety object' is older
than the meaning 'non-specific object' since it
can be argued that the former meaning is less
abstract than the latter.

I guess what I'm wondering is whether there is
really such a difference in Dakotan or whether it
is just in the speakers' English translations, as
they struggle to "explain" how such verb forms can
be rendered into English.  They have a problem
because English requires a transitive translation
of a grammatically intransitive verb.

Bob