Lakota wa- 'variety object'

[ROOD DAVID S]

As you might surmise, the email from Regina was not sent out of the blue;
she and I have been debating this for a couple of weeks now.  I haven't
been able to come up with anything as neat as Bob's theory, however, and I
think he makes very good sense.  I guess I was misled by my exprience with
Wichita noun incorporation, where the incorporated object usually IS an
argument of the verb.

It is certainly the case that Lakota speakers manipulate valence readily.
Another example is a noun like wakhalyapi 'coffee'.  (I think I have said
this before, so if I'm repeating myself to you, please forgive me -- maybe
there is someone on the list who hasn't heard it.) The root is stative
khat- 'be hot'; it is made causative with -ya, thereby adding an agent, so
now it has two arguments, viz. 'S/he heated it.'.  Then you add the -pi,
which is here (I claim -- not uncontroversial) a passive, effectively
deleting the agent again, but now the remaining argument is the object of
a transitive verb, not the subject of stative verb.  The construction at
this point means something like 'it has been heated'.  Finally, you add
the wa- to take away that remaining argument, and you have a zero-argument
construction only approximately rendered in English with 'heated stuff'.

David

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003, R. Rankin wrote:

> Hi Regina,
 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."