Tutelo verb 'go'

[Marianne Mithun]

Actually this is exactly why it is important to distinguish active/stative 
patterns from agent/patient patterns. Active/stative patterns are driven by 
Aktionsart, that is, the difference between events and states. 
Agent/patient systems are driven by the role of the referent, as 
instigating, volitional, in control, etc. Both occur, sometimes within the 
same language, but agent/patient systems are much more common 
cross-linguistically.

The two often yield similar patterns. Events are often instigated by agents 
and states often impact patients. A verb like 'jump' denotes an event and 
would usually appear with an agent in agent/patient systems, and an active 
participant in active/stative systems; a verb like 'be sick' denotes a 
state and would usually appear with a patient in agent/patient systems, and 
a stative participant in active/stative systems. But it is exactly in 
situations like the ones we're discussing that the distinction is 
important. From there of course cross-linguistic details become 
interesting: whether instigation or control is criterial when they do not 
coincide, what is classified as volitional, what is classified as a state, 
etc.

(In Iroquoian languages, 'go' is grammatically stative, but occurs with 
agent pronominals, not surprisingly.)

Marianne.

--On Friday, June 14, 2013 10:44 PM +0000 "Rankin, Robert L." 
<rankin at KU.EDU> wrote:

>
> That sounds very peculiar to me.  I suspect that what you're seeing is
> the disjunctive (i.e., independent) pronominal for the 1st person rather
> than the patient.  You may already have my active/stative comparative
> paper, but just in case, I'll attach a copy.  The last section is an
> addition on OVS that attempts to explain the pronominals.  Bottom line:
> I don't think Tutelo uses stative subjects with "go".
>
> Bob
>
>
> __________________________________________________
>
> From: Siouan Linguistics [SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu] on behalf of David
> Kaufman [dvkanth2010 at GMAIL.COM]
> Sent: Friday, June 14, 2013 4:13 PM
> To: SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu
> Subject: Tutelo verb 'go'
>
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> It seems Tutelo's verb 'go' takes a patientive/object rather than
> active/subject pronoun prefix, wi- instead of wa-.  Does any other Siouan
> language do this?  (I can't compare with Biloxi since it lost this
> agent/patient distinction in pronouns.)  I'm particularly interested in
> this because two Lower Mississippi Valley languages, Atakapa and
> Chitimacha, also seem to take patientive/object instead of active/subject
> pronouns with the verb 'go.'  At first I thought this was strange and
> counterintuitive, but now I'm seeing it may be a more common phenomenon
> well beyond the Mississippi Valley.  Any thoughts?
>
> Dave
>
> --
> David Kaufman, Ph.C.
> University of Kansas
> Linguistic Anthropology