Instrumentals (was Re: "vertitive" ...)

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2004, Marianne Mithun wrote:
> I've generally used 'means and manner' affixes for these, because their
> functions do blend this way. And they are not referential in the way that
> nouns in an instrumental case are.

This is certainly generally true, but the term instrumental is somewhat
embedded in Siouanist terminology, and, I think elsewhere in Americanist
usage, too.

Just out of curiosity, has anyone seen a Siouan instrumental prefix used
in a referential way?  I don't have any specific examples in mind, but I
do have a nagging impression I have seen some instances that were a bit
out of the "non-referential" range.

The best I can come up with at the moment is use of OP dha- (cf. Da ya-)
with the gloss in Dorsey of 'to speak of as ...', the specific example
being dhaxu'be 'to speak of as holy', where xube (is this xube' or xu'be -
I forget) is 'be holy'.  This reminds me of the English usage - not very
productive, I think - 'to X-mouth' as in 'to bad-mouth' or 'to
poor-mouth'.  This isn't what I'd think of as referential, but it does
seem to treat the instrumental as more of a main verb.  I suppose that
causative uses of Da yu- are more or less comparable.

If referential uses exist, this would be somewhat analogous to the
locatives occurring governing (or implying) both peripheral and central
constituents, which I think is certainly the case, at least throughout
Mississippi Valley Siouan.