Come and Suddenly (RE: i- in Dhegiha i-POSITIONAL=...CAUSE)

[Mary Marino]

John,

Excuse me:  what are the "archives"  that you mention in the last paragraph
below?  If there is an archive of these email exchanges I would like to
know how to access them:  I am trying to save portions for my PhD student
(interdisciplinary studies) who needs some of this material but can hardly
handle it on a message-by-message basis.  I have been saving everything to
compile for his Comps - suitably arranged and weeded out.  This student is
Dakota, but not in linguistics and not a fluent speaker.  His research is
in culture and history.
Any help would be appreciated.

         Mary


At 06:13 PM 2/2/2004 -0700, you wrote:
>On Mon, 2 Feb 2004, Rory M Larson wrote:
> > As far as I know, there are just four basic verbs of
> > motion available:
>
>                                   PS      Da
> >   MVS *re, OP dhe, 'go'         *rE(h)  yA
> >       *u,     i,   'come'       *(h)u   u
> >       *i, (?) hi,  'get there'  *hi     i
> >       *thi,   thi, 'get here'   *thi    hi
>
>Dakota loses initial *h and and then reduces *th to h, so you do end up
>with one h-form - but a diffferent form from OP, Winnebago, etc.
>
>The initial of *(h)u is a bit odd - another anomalous h.  Most Dhegiha has
>hu, but OP has just i < *u.  The Dh first and second persons, in OP, too,
>suggest hu, as you get phu/s^u (or phi/s^i in OP).  We could put this down
>to loss of h in the third person in OP, but there are two other oddities
>with this stem that support *u.
>
>1) The vertitive is *ku (e.g., OP gi, Os ku), *not* *khu.
>2) That Dakota compound hiyu, conservatively inflected hibu/hinu/hiyu, has
>bu, not phu, in the first person.
>
>I'm inclined to think that the stem is *u, but that the first and second
>person stem, maybe the third person stem, too, became *hu even in PMV by
>analogy with *hi 'to arrive there'.  In short, bu/s^u/u (an oral glottal
>stop stem) was a bit too odd of a paradigm even for PMV.
>
> > So what other options do we have, if not the 'come' form?
>
>A mysterious fifth motion verb - a sort of generic covering both coming
>and going.  Or a locative, of course.  Or I guess we could opt for
>irregular raising of *u to i across Dhegiha and IO.  I like that last
>least.
>
>You can find these forms in (OP) text by looking for the appropriate
>shapes (some with a- on the motion stems), or by searching on glosses like
>start, begin, suddenly, or repeatedly.  You also run into them
>periodically in elicitation, e.g., try 'to push' or maybe 'to shove' or
>'to throw'.  Think of things that have to be done suddenly to be done
>well, and make sure the context doesn't suggest a continuative or present.
>That is, 'I pushed him', not 'I am pushing a grocery cart'.
>
>Or, you can find them under the suggested glosses in dictionaries, and, if
>you look far enough, you find them appended to other verbs in dictionaries
>of Dhegiha, IO, or Winnebago, generally with no gloss or explanation
>offered.
>
>I haven't seen this latter pattern in Dakota, where they seem to be more
>or less moribund (or not as productive).
>
>I haven't studied texts outside of OP, so I don't know how common
>textually they are in other languages.  In OP they are less common than
>progressives, but there's maybe one example per page or so, on average.
>I think you'd want to teach them at about the same point where Russian
>courses start looking at perfective/imperfective in detail.  Second year?
>
>Certain forms are more common, e.g., thidhe(dhe) (j^ire(hi) in IO or Wi),
>dhedhe, idhe, idhaN(dhaN), but if you look in a large set of examples,
>e.g., a whole dictionary or the OP texts, you find sporadic instances of
>most of the combinatorial possibilities.
>
>If you ponder the semantics of given examples the motion verbs and
>positional seem to make sense in terms of the path followed by the action,
>or the shape of the object, etc., but I don't think I would be able to
>predict forms for a particular verb confidently.
>
>It seems that you generally get one particular form with a given main
>verb, not a variety of forms with different shades of meaning.  In effect,
>verbs have a sort of shape gender in the languages where these forms
>prevalent.  I've never done elicitation on this, so I really don't know if
>all verbs have a particular "inceptive/instantive/frequentive" auxiliary
>or not.  Maybe some do vary the verb with intent or randomly, and maybe
>some verbs can't take such auxiliaries.  I didn't really notice the whole
>thing until after my fieldwork, I'm afraid.
>
>The same sort of gender like consideration seems to govern whether you get
>the, khe, or dhaN (or even ge) as an evidential particle with a given
>verb.  By the way, there was a nice khe evidential example in the
>discussion of prairies, lowlands, and hollows - I think I let it go
>without comment, figuring folks might get tire of my little obsessions.
>
>If desired I can supply some examples of "aorist" auxiliaries in context,
>though I believe I may have done this already (check the archives).