Historical Explanation for *pi as Plural and Proximate and Nominalizer

[Rankin, Robert L]

Hi Sara,

What font are you using for this handout?  There are some glitches in my
copy and it is displaying in New Times Roman.

Bob

-----Original Message-----
From: Trechter, Sara [mailto:STrechter at csuchico.edu]
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2004 1:14 PM
To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
Subject: RE: Historical Explanation for *pi as Plural and Proximate and
Nominalizer


My email has been out for two days or I'd have posted on this earlier. I
agree with Ardis' account, and a couple of years ago presented a paper
in Santa Barbara WAIL showing the grammaticalization of /pi/ maybe from
that verb meaning 'to accompany' into the different paths of a what John
Koontz and others are calling a 'proximate' marker, and the plural in
MissVS. There are nice transition examples of this in Lakhota texts
collected by Deloria where -pi is used on the verb, but the main actor
in the sentence is singular. Deloria points out in a note that for
instance if a lot of people arrived or came together, then sometimes
only the most prominent person would be mentioned. I think that the
nominalizer function comes later.  Here are Lakhota examples and
Deloria's comments.  Forgive the enclosure....it captures the font.