double inflection (Re: animate wa-)

[REGINA PUSTET]

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



> We might find some "newer" pattern uses in

> older materials, too, or at least this is the case in Omaha-Ponca for

> other innovations: modern day uses tend to occur sporadically in earlier

> materials, too. An example would be the modern practice of inflecting

> daNbe 'to see' doubly as attaN'be 'I ...', dhas^taN'be 'you ...'. Mostly

> Dorsey reports ttaN'be, s^taNbe, but a few speakers in his day were using

> the "modern" forms.



Double inflection of this type is extremely marginal in Lakota -- right now only one verb comes to my mind that behaves like the OP forms, i.e. iNyaNkA 'to run'. In the Boas/Deloria materials, and also in Buechel 1971, this verb is quoted as having wa-'iNmnaNkA for first person singular, which also is the standard Rosebud form today. My Rosebud speaker (about 80 years old) mentioned that Pine Ridge uses the (simplified, regularized) form wa-'iNyaNkA instead. My Pine Ridge speaker (about the same age) has confirmed this form, adding that in the 1930s, Pine Ridge had wa-'iNblaNkA for 'I run'. One way of dealing with this is by hypothesizing that Lakota has moved beyond an earlier (pan-Siouan??) stage of using double inflection with many verbs to a point where erstwhile doubly inflecting paradigms have been completely regularized by eliminating the irregular (or let's say, less regular) part of the inflection, i.e. -mn-/-bl- in the case of wa-'iNmnaNkA/wa-'iNblaNkA, retaining o!
nly the
 canonical wa- '1SG.AG' marker. So that the Pine Ridge state of affairs represents the most innovative stage in the overall development. From my work on Osage on the basis of the LeFlesche materials I remember that this language has/had a lot of doubly inflecting verbs. I can't imagine that individual Siouan languages have "invented" double inflection independently from each other. OP double inflection patterns would then occupy the centerpiece of the cycle, while structures like OP ttaNb'e 'I see' would be the historical point of departure.



Regina



---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Find out what made the Top Yahoo! Searches of 2003
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/siouan/attachments/20040103/24fe4d90/attachment.htm>