Tutelo verb 'go'

[Anthony Grant]

Dave et al:  this would be supportive but not definitive evidence.  What is the clincher is the dearth of productive inflectional morphology.

Anthony

>>> David Kaufman <dvkanth2010 at GMAIL.COM> 17/06/2013 19:44 >>>
The one sentence in your data, Bob, 'hodke tok ire chunkete posse', would
seem to indicate a pidginized language, since most pidgins, I think, adopt
Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) order (with the major exception of Mobilian
Jargon, which maintained a verb-final order).

Great paper!

Dave

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 11:44 AM, ROOD DAVID S <david.rood at colorado.edu>wrote:

> 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
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>


--
David Kaufman, Ph.C.
University of Kansas
Linguistic Anthropology

Edge Hill University
Times Higher University of the Year - shortlisted 2007, 2010, 2011
www.edgehill.ac.uk 


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