animate wa-

[lcumberl at indiana.edu]

With apologies if I’m missing something obvious, but I’m trying to understand
which wa- is which in this example:

>
> waná  ma-tháNka    cha wa-w-ó-wa-kiyiN          na 

> now   1SG.PAT-big  so  WA-WA-help-1SG.AG-help   and
> 'now I was big, so I helped (people?) with the work to
> be done'

I find at least two examples in Boas and Deloria (1941:53) where wa- has animate
reference:

wao’hola   ‘to be respectful to persons, things’
wao’kiya   ‘to help people’

Shaw (1980:79) observes that when wa- “clearly has a pronominal function and
signifies an indefinite object (usually translated as ‘persons’ or ‘things’)
it’s [a] does not delete.” She includes waokiya ‘to help people’ as an example,
taken from Boas and Deloria.

What I don’t find anywhere is where wókiya means ‘to help people’, so is wókiya
one of those coalesced words with special meaning, i.e. ‘to help with the work
to be done’?  If so, in this example I guess the first wa- would have to refer
to people and the second w(a)- to a specialized meaning, “the work to be done”?

Regarding the following:

> hé    thokéya   pteblés^ka   ki   wichá-kte-pi
> that  first     cattle       DEF  3PL.PAT-kill-PL
>
> na    wa-pháta-pi
> and   WA-butcher-PL
> 'first they killed the cows and butchered them'
>
> Pteblés^ka 'cattle' is the implied referent of wa- in
> wa-phata-pi 'they butchered them'. But since the
> (basically animate) cattle are already dead when being
> butchered, does wa- still count as an animate referent
> in wa-phata-pi 'they butchered them'? Similarly, the
> following example raises the question of whether
> plants or plant parts qualify as animate or not.

I would have expected wicha-phata-pi rather than wa-phata. Could the sentence
mean something like, ‘they killed the cows and then they did some butchering’?

In my Assiniboine data I have the following, with wicha- twice:

phaghuNta zhena wicha-wa-o    $paN-wicha-wa-ya   chen
duck      those them 1S-shoot cook-them-1S-Caus  then/therefore
‘I shot those ducks then I cooked them’


Linda