animate wa-

Sat Jan 3 17:16:17 UTC 2004

Koontz John E <John.Koontz at colorado.edu> wrote:

> while wic^ha does have that "definite object"

> inflectional role, wic^ha and wa also act as a pair in the area of

> "indefinite objects," with wic^ha covering the human cases, and wa the

> rest.

This is my impression too, although the semantic range of wa- also covers animals, and the question of whether wa- has to do with definiteness, or rather with specificity or referentiality, still needs detailed investigation, at least to me.

> if, as I have always assumed, wic^ha is a Dakotan

> innovation, replacing some uses of wa, then maybe this would account for

> any residual exceptional uses of wa preserved lexically in Dakotan?

This is the solution that would take care of the more exceptional and potentially troublesome cases of the use of wa- in LAkota, with respetc to both multiple wa- and animate wa-. For "inconvenient" appearances of multiple wa-, maybe together with seemingly coreferential full NPs, as in some of my earlier examples, we could argue then that at least one of the wa-s is fossilized in such a way that it has become part of the lexical root and has lost its individual meaning.

> A question this immediately raises, is whether examples in texts or other

> data suggest that the range of uses of wic^ha has been expanding

> historically at the expense of wa? Is thi'wic^hakte - as a particular

> example of wic^ha use - replacing thi'wakte in nominalizations or

> indefinite object cases? If so, we'd probably expect wa in older examples

> where today we find wic^ha.

In other words, the general (and still hypothetical) picture is this: wicha- is intruding the domain of non-specific object coding as a specialized marker for non-specific animate object. At an earlier stage in the development of Lakota, non-specific object coding might have been "monopolized" by wa-, which means that the semantic range of wa- might must have covered both animate and inanimate non-specific objects back then. Today the animate usage of wa- is, by and large, obsolete, and merely survives in marginal forms such as w-okiye 'to help people'. In most contexts, non-specific animate objects are now coded by wicha-. I'd fully subscribe to this analysis -- I'd even like to take the argumentation one step further.

Over the holidays, I took a close look at the wa-section in Buechel,and the results are quite interesting. So far, we have mainly discussed uses of wa- as a transitive object marker, but obviously, at least in the fixed lexical expressions I found in Buechel, wa- often occurs with intransitive bases as well in LAkota. Within these lexical expressions -- and that's the crucial point -- the frequency of unequivocally ANIMATE wa- is higher than I expected. Here are some examples (Constantine has just posted a much more complete list):

wa-kaN-ka 'old woman'  < kaN 'old', -ka 'kind of'

wa-khaNyez^a 'child' < khaNyez^a 'child'

wa-hu-topa 'quadruped' < hu 'leg', topa 'four'

wa-hu-nuNpa 'biped' < hu 'leg', nuNpa 'two'

wa-mni-tu 'large marine animal (such as whale, shark, octopus)' < mni 'water', -tu 'LOC'

Maybe there is an alternative, but as far as I can tell at the moment, wa- in the above examples has to be analyzed as referring to the subject of the intransitive lexical roots in question. Such as: wa-hu-nuNpa 'biped' = 'two-legged thing/being, thing/being that is two-legged'. But if this analysis is correct, and we are dealing with established lexical items here, i.e. items that have been around for a pretty long time, such fossilized uses of wa- with animate reference could point to an earlier stage in the development of Lakota wa- in which this element was totally productive with animate reference.

In the meantime, I have tried to elicit additional combinations of intransitive bases with wa-, both for animate and inanimate contexts, but the output is not very encouraging. I.e., intransitive wa- is not very productive these days. The question that has to be raised at this point is: is intransitive wa- too new to be productive or is it too old to be productive? There is some evidence that seems to support the second option. First, my speaker gave me the forms

wa-luta 'ceremonial flag'  < luta 'red'

wa-suta  'seeded, like corn'  < suta 'hard'

and she feels that these are "old words". Further, the lexical items

wa-ks^ica 'bowl'

wa-h^pe 'leaf'

are based on intransitive roots which appear to be obsolete today (at least they are not in Buechel), but they are phonetically and semantically akin to the following roots, which can be found in Buechel: ks^iz^a 'bent' and ks^iks^aN 'crooked', as well as h^payA 'to fall'. On this basis, wa-ks^ica 'bowl' could be analyzed as 'thing that is bowl-shaped' or so, and wa-h^pe 'leaf' could be analyzed (very tentatively of course) as 'thing that fell (off the tree)'. If the lexemes wa-ks^ica 'bowl' and wa-h^pe 'leaf' were created at a time when the now obsolete roots were still in use, the wa- that is part of the package has the same age. Remember that this type of wa- has intransitive reference. As I said above, in my data (the texts I collected, elicitation, plus Buechel, so far), animate readings of wa- appear mostly in the context of intransitive wa-. If there is something to this tendency of coupling animate wa- with intransitive wa-, then we can conclude, in keeping with John!
's and
 Bob's view, that animate wa- is of the same age as intransitive wa-, i.e. something that has been fragmentarily inherited from an earlier stage in the history of Lakota and survives exclusively (?) in fossilized forms.

Q. E. D., or maybe not... We'd need much more (cross-Siouan?) evidence to fully substantiate this.

Regina

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