Benefactive Reflexives

[ROOD DAVID S]

For what it's worth, the situation in Lakota is very confued/confusing,
and seems to vary from verb to verb and sometimes from speaker to speaker.
Many verbs use the same form for both "I did it to myself" and "I did it
to my own/for myself" (those two readings are usually both possible), but
occasionally one can distinguish, though not the same way every time.  I
gave up looking for any patterns in this area a long time ago, and I don't
think I have a list of which verbs do what anywhere.

David



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

On Tue, 16 Nov 2004, Koontz John E wrote:

> On Mon, 15 Nov 2004 lcumberl at indiana.edu wrote:
> > In Assiniboine I have one clear context-free example of such a form:
> >
> > kiknaN'ka    'to put away/save for oneself'  from e'knaNka 'put'
>
> This is definitely the same kind of reading, but I think that kik- here
> isn't a reflexive in morphological terms.  It's a suus form, right?
> How's the simple stem inflected?  I'm wondering if it's underlyingly
> a-(k)i-naNka?  Which it could be in Omaha-Ponca, but in that case the
> reading would be a dative 'to put someone's on something; to put something
> on something for someone'.  (And this stem doesn't have *-ka in OP,
> either.)  (The datives are the ki's that contract with vowels in OP,
> whereas it's the suus ki's that do that in Dakotan!)
>
> > Your other example, 'to seek', is one'; the ki- form is oki'ne, but it has
> > straight suus meaning: 'to look for one's own'.
>
> The Dhegiha reflexive/reciprocal is kki- (written just ki- in the popular
> OP orthographies), while the suus is gi- (written gi- ditto).  That
> Dakotan ic^?i- is unique to Dakotan.  I think there's a Dakota reciprocal
> in khi- (or is it ikhi-?) that is cognate with the Dhegiha reflexive.
>
> > kag^a 'make' behaves exceptionally with regard to the KI morphemes.
> > ki'c^ag^a alternates with ki'c^ic^ag^a, both meaning 'make for someone'.
> > To my knowledge, ka'g^a is the only verb that has alternate forms for
> > the benefactive. 'Make for oneself' is, as in your example, reflexive:
> > ic^?i'c^agha, which does *not* mean 'make oneself'
>
> Does kuNza have anything similar?
>