OP: coming and going

Tue May 23 17:36:11 UTC 2006

On Mon, 22 May 2006, Rory M Larson wrote:
> I know pHi can mean 'I arrived there', but does it ever mean 'I came'?

I probably shouldn't get too fussy about semantics, since my brain doesn't
work very well in that direction, but I think it always means something
like 'to travel to a distal point, and emphasize arriving there'.
However, it might well translate to or from 'come' in a particular English
context, because the semantics of 'come' and 'go' work differently.

For example, I think an English sentence like 'That was just after I came
to Macy.' would involve hi, not i, whereas 'I came to Macy every day for a
month.' might be i and not hi.  For that matter, a sentence like 'He went
to Denver.' might be hi.

> The above chart indicates that MVS *(h)u, 'come', and *hi, 'arrive
> there', collapse together phonemically in A1 and A2 in OP:

Which is definitely awkward amd might have an effect on usage.

> No, we're still missing an A1 'come' example, and that's the one I'm
> asking about.  The one you started:
>
> > Hero boy arrives to rescue maiden:
> >
> > 90:122.7-10
> >
> > ea'thaN s^i'=a?  ... QUESTION
> > why     have you come
> >
> > ahi=bi=ama  nu'z^iNga=akha
> > he had come boy       the
>
> has A2 (s^i) for i, 'come', but the second sentence is unrelated, having A3
> (ahi) for hi, 'arrive there'.  The full sentence is actually
>
>   GaN' s^I ni' kHE'di ahi' biama' nu'z^iNga akHa'.
>   And again the boy arrived there at the water.

You're right!  Not a good pair.  I was looking for pairs that showed the
morphology and were linked pragmatically by context as much as for first
and second person pairs per se, but not only is this pair not parallel,
but one is i 'come' and the other hi 'arrive there'.

> So do we have any known cases in OP of pHi as the A1 of i, 'come'?  Or has
> ppi, the A1 of gi, 'come back', entirely replaced it, such that ppi means
> either 'I came' or 'I came back', and pHi is used only for 'I went
> (arrived) there'?

I couldn't say for modern usage, but I think phi in both 'I come' and 'I
arrive there' senses occurs in Dorsey.

1890:199.12

kki dhe' udhu'ahe       bdhe'=dhiN wa'dhighe=       akha=di phi
and this I followed her I went the she married them the at  I arrived

And I got to where the woman whom I was following had married someone
(else) (or maybe 'had been sleeping around')

(This is said in discussion after returning.)

1890:297.17

e'=di phi'=     hnaN=     maN   e'=de sabe' he'ga=b=az^i
there I arrived regularly I-AUX but   wise  they were not a little

Though I went there frequently, they were exceedingly cautious

Here "went" seems to work better in English, but Dorsey renders it "I
arrived," and clearly intends a different verb from ppi, which he renders
'I came back', 'I was coming back', 'I was bringing it back', etc.

For phi 'I come':

1890:87.14

Hau!  Udhi'dha=i=             egaN,    winaN'?aN  phi'               ha
Ho!   you have been spoken of CONJUNCT I hear you I have been coming DEC

"Ho, as they have been talking about you, I have come to hear you."

1890:170.19

E'dabe e=s^naN=xc^i awa'giaN=bdha phi    e'd=       egaN,
also   quite alone  I left mine   I came UNEXPECTED CONJUNCT

ga=thaN'=xti awa'gittaNbe kkaN'=bdha
at last      I see my own I wish

"Also, having come here alone, leaving home and family behind, I have
reached a point where I long to see them."

In addition, though I'll put off looking them up at present, Dorsey has
the paradigms for the various verbs of motion in his draft grammar.  So,
although he was certainly influenced in his work by Riggs, I believe he
found a three-way contrast (with some hmophony in A1 and A2 of i and hi).

It definitely helps in working with these verbs to keep track of the
relative location of speech act and activity discussed, not to mention
whether it is diredt discourse or indirect discourse, since "I have
arrived here, he said" and "he arrived there" present two different
versions of the same event.

It may be time for somebody more knowledgeable to jump in, but I think
that English 'come' and 'go' can refer to 'motion toward' and 'motion
away' relative to a goal or source, if specified or implicit, and revert
to being relative the locus of the speech act only if they are not.  But
I'm not sure Siouan languages do this.  I think their motion verbs are
always relative to the locus of the speech act.

Has anyone gone into the semantics of Siouan motion verbs in detail?

Barring that, there is an article that (so far as I have gotten through
it) is generally useful:

Talmy, Leonard.  1985, 1987.  "Lexicalization patterns:  semantic
structure in lexical form."  In Timothy Shopen, ed.  Language typolocy and
syntactic description, III:  Grammatical categories and the lexicon."  Pp.
57-150.

Talmy treats motion verbs among other cases, and suggests that languages
tend to have sets that distinguish path + fact-of-motion, manner/cause +
fact-of-motion, or figure + fact-of-motion.

Most Indo-European languages have motion verbs of the second type.  The
first type are found in Romance, Semitic, Polynesian, Nez Perce, and
Caddo.  Also, I think Siouan.  For the third type his examples are
Atsugewi and Navajo.

His Spanish examples include usages like:

La botella entro' a/salio' de la cueva (flotando)
The bottle floated in/out of the cave

La botella se fue' de/volvio' a la orilla (flotando)
The floated away from/back to the bank

Showing that you have to specify the path, not the manner.

Of course this says nothing about where the path is anchored or about
arriving vs. starting or being en route, and Talmy doesn't go into that.

For those who were wondering about "type 3," such languages tend to to
require that the nature of the movement (into or through certain things)
be specified, rather than the path or manner of moving.  I won't try to
include the transcriptions, but the Atsugewi examples are:

yucky stuff + on the ground + by gravity + inflection
The guts are on the ground

yucky stuff + into liquid + by wind + inflection
The guts blew into the creek

yucky stuff + into fire + using a linear object moving axially +
inflection
I prodded the guts into the fire with a stick

Type two, of course, is exhibited in the English glosses.