telicity marking in Siouan and Caddoan

[ROOD DAVID S]

Quite a few years ago Geraldine Legendre and I published a paper in the 
Berkeley Linguistic Society proceedings which dealt primarily with 
argument marking and the active/stative verb distinction in Lakota.  We 
had a few things to say about telicity there, but that was so long ago I 
don't remember the details.  I'll try to remember to supply the reference 
and summarize the relevant points when I get to the office again in the 
middle of this coming week.  What I recall is that we were able to force 
the speaker to make a distinction between "for" and "in" adverbials, but 
it was extremely forced -- one of them requred a 5-syllable adverb, an 
extremely long word for a function word in this language.
 	Lakota matches the pattern that Bryan described pretty well, in 
that aspect is marked by verbal enclitics, along with several dozen other 
categories like evidential, speaker confidence, politeness, negation of 
various sorts, speech-act category, and so on.  The simple verb has no 
marking for aspect, though of course there are semantic classes.  The 
primary verbal inflection is neither tense nor aspect, but 
realis/irrealis.  So-called "stative" verbs are not always stative, they 
simply show a relative lack of control by their argument(s).
 	A couple of my students have been working on a correlation between 
inherent (semantic) aspect and the use of some of the enclitics; I'll see 
if they have anything ready to make public.

David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu

On Mon, 12 Jul 2010, David Erschler wrote:

> Bryan, thanks!
>
> I am still very curious about "in"-adverbials: perhaps someone of the list
> subscribers has encountered them in their language(s) of expertise.
>
> With best wishes,
> David
>
> On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 8:56 PM, Bryan James Gordon <linguista at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Speaking for Siouan in general (if I may be permitted), the most common
>> aspect distinction in the family is between continuative and an unmarked
>> non-continuative. I am not familiar with the reasons we call it
>> "continuative" as opposed to "imperfective", but I recall being relatively
>> convinced by whatever argument I heard in the past. I do know that the
>> unmarked is used for statives. Other marked aspects are common, too: I think
>> most Siouan languages also have some sort of iterative or habitual, and it
>> is common for lexical verbs to mark aspectual and aktionsart information
>> like "suddenly", "repeatedly", "abruptly". Positional verbs often mark
>> information like stativity, perfect aspect, inferred or derived states,
>> immediacy, continuativity, etc.
>>
>> As for Omaha and Ponca in particular, generally the atelic "for" temporal
>> phrases you refer to are unmarked:
>> Míⁿdoⁿbe-wiⁿ-égoⁿ oⁿgthíⁿi.
>> hour-one-about we.sat
>> "We sat for about an hour."
>> Wáthiⁿ-athái-égoⁿ míⁿdoⁿbe ánaxti-égoⁿ ahíi-tʰe
>> them.have-they.go-as hour what.number.AUG-about they.arrived-C
>> "After they chased them for a good number of hours"
>>
>> I am not familiar with any telic "in"-type temporal phrases.
>>
>> --
>> ***********************************************************
>> Bryan James Gordon, MA
>> Joint PhD Program in Linguistics and Anthropology
>> University of Arizona
>> ***********************************************************
>>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Dr. David Erschler
>
> Independent University of Moscow
> Bolshoy Vlasyevskiy per. 11
> Moscow 119002
> Russia
>