Tutelo verb 'go'

[ROOD DAVID S]

Wow... sounds a little like the Hindi (and neighbors) shift from 
accusative to ergative in perfect tenses.

 	Have you ever thought of any tests for "stativity" in Siouan 
besides the pronoun choices?  Lakota stative verbs use a different pattern 
for reduplication than do active verbs, and there are separate rules for 
k-palatalization for statives (nikhuz^e without palatalization, e.g.).  I 
don't have those facts clear in my head, however.  Anything else?

 	I appreciate Bob's description of the evolution of these patterns 
in OVS, blaming most of it on phonology, and I always prefer a 
phonological explanation to a semantic one.  But the fact that motion 
verbs take patient pronouns here and there, as mentioned in some of the 
other contributions to this thread, makes one wonder if there's more to it 
than phonology.

 	Best,
 	David



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

On Sat, 15 Jun 2013, Marianne Mithun wrote:

> 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
>>> 
>