Tutelo verb 'go'

[Marianne Mithun]

Ah, it's in the aspect suffixes, loud and clear. In Northern Iroquoian 
(which is all of Iroquoian except Cherokee), all verbs (except imperatives) 
are obligatorily inflected for aspect: Habitual, Perfective, or Stative. So 
for that, we just look at the marking on the end.

Stative verbs include things that everyone would immediately agree are 
states: 'be rich', 'be new' . . .  Here the choice of pronominal paradigm 
is interesting. For resultant states ('wet'), usually patient prefixes are 
used. For inherent states, usually agent forms.

For transitive verbs, the statives are perfect, a kind of resultant state: 
'I have eaten'. These have stative endings and patient pronominal prefixes. 
(I'm just sitting here full now.)

An interesting wrinkle is that some formally stative verbs are things that 
we might think, from their translations, as say progressive: 'singing'. 
These are often activities without a tangible product. The verb 'go' could 
be interpreted as 'be in motion' perhaps, as one grasps at straws for an 
explanation.

(Habituals and Perfectives usually occur with agents, but some occur with 
patients, such as 'to lose something', 'to yell', etc.) The agent or 
patient paradigm gets established with a particular verb stem, and will 
stick even if the stem meanders semantically.

Iroquoian is thus a little more interesting, because there is a basically 
agent/patient system with an active/stative overlay (stative perfects 
obligatorily occurring with patients).

Marianne


--On Saturday, June 15, 2013 6:39 PM -0600 ROOD DAVID S 
<david.rood at COLORADO.EDU> wrote:

> Marianne, thanks for that little essay.  What are the "stative"
> properties of Iroquoian 'go'?  I'm used to relying on the pronoun choice
> to classify the verbs; how do you separate them?
> Best,
> David
>
> David S. Rood
> Dept. of Linguistics
> Univ. of Colorado
> 295 UCB
> Boulder, CO 80309-0295
> USA
> rood at colorado.edu
>
> On Fri, 14 Jun 2013, Marianne Mithun wrote:
>
>> 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
>>