wa- as indefinite-plural-human

[Rankin, Robert L]

Hmmmmm, I somehow came away from John's paper at SACC believing that his point was that waa- *is* a valence reducer and that there is a conspicuous lack of convincing examples of the prefix used as a genuine argument.  There have been many examples given on this list of instances in which waa- could be interpreted either way, but few to none in which it *had* to be interpreted as a plural argument.  Maybe I'm just getting old and missed the bus on John's conclusion?  It's also the case that sometimes the definition of what constitutes an "argument" of the verb can be theory-dependent, but I still thought I understood his point as being counter-argument, at least with regard to Hidatsa.

The fact that so very many of the examples of this phenomenon can be interpreted either way, especially in English translation where the object pronoun analysis is often forced by English structure (or by bilingual speakers), makes the waa- construction a perfect candidate for diachronic reinterpretation however.  So it doesn't surprise me that some speakers would begin using waa- as a plural obj. pronoun.  This fits well with Catherine's analysis, and I expect she's right.  

So, John, did I nod off at a critical point in your paper??

Bob


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU on behalf of Catherine Rudin
Sent: Tue 12/8/2009 9:20 AM
To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU
Subject: Re: wa- as indefinite-plural-human
 
I'm still of the "why can't it be both" persuasion.  

This is a really nice example of wa as argument.  But that doesn't mean it's ALWAYS an argument; I'd be perfectly happy with it being sometimes an argument, sometimes a valence reducer, and sometimes ambiguous.  

Catherine

>>> Bryan James Gordon <linguista at gmail.com> 12/7/2009 6:50 PM >>>
I've got something I just found in Dorsey which may help back up des Herrn
Professor Doktor Boyle claim that those pesky wa- prefixes are not valence
reducers but actual arguments. Look at the agreement here:

(Dorsey 1890: 120.4-5)
Xubái éga? égitha?i ki wébaha?-hná?i he.
sacred.3PROX 3.SIM say.to.PL when WA.know-FREQ.3PROX DECL.F
"Since he is sacred, when they say it to [one another], he always knows it
of them."

It's important to realise that in O&P (other languages too?) "know" is a
subject-object-raising verb, and obligatorily takes as its object the
subject of the subordinate clause. (This is as far as I'm aware, I don't
know if that's universally true of course.) The subject of the subordinate
clause here is "indefinite-plural-human", just like the non-referring
3rd-person-plural stuff you get in Romance languages. And it just so happens
that there is an object morpheme for that sort of argument: wa!

Oh well, the valence-reducer idea was nice though, wasn't it?

- Bryan