FW: possessive constructions in siouan

[Rankin, Robert L]

I received this from this scholar in the Netherlands.  I haven't replied
to it yet, but I'm sure he would be overjoyed to hear from any of you
who can help him.
 
Bob
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Leon Stassen [mailto:l.stassen at let.ru.nl] 
Sent: Monday, January 31, 2005 7:51 PM
To: Rankin, Robert L
Subject: possessive constructions in siouan



Dear Professor Rankin, 

You probably do not know who I am, so allow me to introduce myself: my
name is Leon Stassen, and I am a language typologist working at the
universities of Nijmegen and Utrecht in the Netherlands. I have gotten
your name and e-mail address from Marianne Mithun (UCSB), who
recommended you as a leading specialist on Siouan. I wonder if I could
ask you some information on these languages? Such information would be
most welcome for the project on which I am currently working.
   My project concerns the expression of (alienable)  predicative
possession in the languages of the world. To put it rather bluntly, I am
interested in the various ways in which a sentence of the type The man
has a house/car/ horse (or whatever things one may alienably possess in
the society at issue) is formally encoded. As is already known in the
literature (e.g. Heine 1998), there are a number of frequently recurring
patterns for such sentences, such as
a)      the Have pattern, featuring a transitive verb, with the
possessor as the subject and the possessed item as the direct object;
English is of course an example;
b)      the Locative Possessive, of the type  To/at/near the man, a/his
horse is/exists 
c)      the Topic-possessive, of the type The man,  a/his  horse
exists 
d)      the With-Possessive, of the type The man exists/is with a/his
horse 
but I have found that these are by no means the only ways of predicative
possession encoding. In fact, what I have seen of  Siouan languages so
far would not seem to fit straightforwardly into one of these types. If
I am right in interpreting the data so far (but I would appreciate it
very much if you would correct me) , a sentence like 'I have a dog'
would, in at least some of the Siouan languages such as Lakota and Crow,
have the rough form of something like 
             dog     1SG.PATIENT-exist
but, of course, I can't be sure about this, and in any event, I have a
serious shortage of data. It would be very helpful if you could provide
me with a sample sentence from one or more of these languages; and, if
it is not too much trouble, perhaps you might be so kind as to gloss it?
    Another thing that is problematic for me is the fact that, in some
grammars of Siouan languages, a verb is featured which is constantly
glossed as a transitve 'have'- item; the Lakota verb 'yuka' and the
Biloxi verb ''ita' are cases in point. Now, as far as my sample goes,
North America is not really a place to have original transitive
HAVE-verbs; in fact, Lakota and Biloxi would stand alone on the
continent if they had this feature. Therefore my question is: is it
possible that these 'have'-items are in fact the products of reanalysis
from an erstwhile positional verb such as 'to stand, to lie' etc. ?
This, then, would put these languages on a par with a development that
can be documented for Algonquian, where a positional verb 'aya' (which
means 'to be' in Ojibwa and other Algonquian languages) has been
'transitivized' into a 'have'-verb in Plains Cree.  

I am fully aware that you, as a specialist, must receive quite a few of
requests such as these, and that, moreover, you have more pressing
things to do than to answer all of these queries. Nonetheless, I would
be most grateful if you could find the time for an answer.

Best regards,

Leon Stassen. 

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