postpositions

[ROOD DAVID S]

Sorry to be so silent for the past couple of weeks -- I won't catch up
with the "wa" discussion for a couple more weeks, either -- but I can tell
you that Wichita has neither postpositions nor prepositions, just
derivational morphology in the verb. There are no PPs, just locative
arguments for the verbs.  "I sat on the rock" would thus be literally
"where the rock is, I sat-on-top".  There is a verb I gloss 'to be a
place' which you can use if you want the locative to be the predicate or
if there is something weird about including the locative in the main verb.

I have a little paper (very speculative, but kind of fun) on a possible
way to relate Siouan and Caddoan on this subject.  It's in Fabrice Cavoto
(ed.), "The Linguist's Linguist: A collection of papers in honour of
Alexis Manaster Ramer".  Lincom Europa 2002.  The printed title is "If
Macro-Siouan is real, how will you explain this?"  I think I intended that
"is" to be "isn't", but it's too late for that now.

David

David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu

On Fri, 2 Jan 2004 bi1 at soas.ac.uk wrote:

> Can anyone tell me whether postpositions rather than prepositions are
> general in Siouan-Caddoan.  I have some sources on Crow, Omaha
> and Wichita, but they are not clear on that point.
> Bruce
>