How great you are/"Porosity" of Lakh. Parts of Speech?

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 29 Jun 2006, Clive Bloomfield wrote:

> I am much exercised by the problem of the classification/ definition of
> Parts of Speech in Lakhota. The fluidity and "porosity" (so to say) of
> Lakhota [and Biloxi] word-categories absolutely intrigues me! I am
> striving, (somewhat unsuccessfully maybe), to undo the effect of years
> of familiarity/training with the relatively "black & white" categorizing
> of "THE Parts of Speech" deriving from Ancient Greek & Latin paradigms
> of grammatical & syntactic analysis:

On Thu, 29 Jun 2006, David Kaufman responded:
> I second this emotion!

Quoting Smokey Robinson?

> Polynesian languages are also a close second to many Amerindian
> languages in their defiance of traditional IE "rules" of grammar (since
> the former rely mostly on "particles" to define a word's part of
> speech).  But of course it's very Eurocentric to think all languages
> should conform to the "traditional" Greek/Latin way of looking at
> language and the world.  This is good practice in "broadening our
> horizons"!

I'm not sure that Siouan languages are fairly characterized as having
fluid parts of speech.  It's more of a formidably developed pracice of
using "zero-marked" derivation.

For example, it's not really the case that any noun can be a verb, for
example.  I gather that in Dakotan, for example, though there are large
classes of nouns that can be verbs, there are also many that require
hec^ha.  (Bruce Ingham has a long discussion of this in his dictionary and
I think David Rood has one somewhere, too, probably in the HBNAI 17
sketch.)  Omaha-Ponca is quite straightlaced about nouns as verbs, though
some can do it, and lacks the hec^ha or anything much like it, though it
does have an inflected verb 'to be' used mostly with "kind of person"
constructions.

The forgoeing deals with cases of nouns becoming verbs.  On the other
hand, "verbs" can also fairly freely become nouns, inflections and all,
which I take not to be flexibility so much as unmarked nominalization and
a more or less complete absence of ways for deriving new nouns from old
ones.  Deverbative nominalization is pretty much the only game in town.
What I haven't seen pursued yet it something about the continuum of
pronominization bahavior.  In Dakota we certainly find things that are
commonly considered nouns, but inflect verbally, e.g., famously Lamakhota,
Lanikhota, etc.  I would argue that this is a verb morphologically, though
it usually serves as a noun.  Something similar is going on in Winnebago
hoc^ii 'house < to dwell in', where the first person possessive is waac^i'
'I dwell in it' and so on.

I have always regretted not asking for 'my saw' and so on in OP, when I
was looking at instrumentals and found forms like we'basa '(a) saw; with
which to cut by pushing (or maybe 'cut with a tool')''.  I suspect it
might be or have been we'ppasa 'I cut with it by pushing' at some point.
Maybe it's we'basa wiwi'tta now?  I seem to remember that this was
discussed once on the list!

I do remember that Regina Pustet has talked about the way that possession
for given nouns in Dakota has changed over time and I think that this goes
hand in hand with a notion that nominalizations may fit into a range of
more verby to less verby behaviors at any given point in a Siouan
language's history.