Active & stative verbs in biclausal sentences.

[Koontz John E]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2004, Rory M Larson wrote:
> I'm not sure this question can even be answered for OP.  One of
> our long-standing frustrations in learning and teaching this
> language is that they just don't seem to have words that equate
> to our "and" and "or".  Lakhota does, but OP doesn't.  To put
> these sentences into modern Omaha, you'd probably just replace
> the "and" with a comma.  At that point, of course, you just have
> two separate, short sentences.

It is difficult to find conjunction of noun phrases even in the Dorsey
texts, though there are a few strategies for doing this.  But between
clauses I'd guess this would be where egaN comes in.  "Having run very
fast, the boy is tired."  "Having chased the deer, the boy was tired."
However, these are Dorsey's learned glosses.  I have no idea how you
elicit this structure using modern colloquial English.  Maybe "having"
works, though I'd be surprised.  Maybe "and then" or "so" or "because"?
Probably this sort of conjunct formation arises most naturally in
connected text.

> I asked who was tired in the second sentence, and it seemed
> obvious to the speakers that it was the boy.  When I asked
> how to say "The boy chased the deer so the deer was tired",
> the arthritic elder speaker rejected the idea on grounds that
> "Deers don't get tired.  They just go running and jumping all
> over the place."

This is the kind of problem I experienced with respect to "establishing a
plausible environment."  Deer do get tired, but not being chased on foot
by human beings.  Omaha speakers seem not to be very happy with
implausible examples.  They definitely don't draw a line between
ungrammatical and implausible.