Re: (tangent thoughts arising from) Active-Ergative langs (discussion)

On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, Marcus Smith wrote:

> dirk elzinga wrote:
>
> >Was that Charney's grammar? I haven't looked closely at SR in
> >Comanche, but there are bound to be differences from Shoshoni, and
> >different people will characterize switch reference differently.
>
> Based on what you said above, Charney's description makes more
> sense.  There are quite a few examples in the book where SR and aspect
> co-occur though.
Yes, there are examples in Shoshoni as well. There are even examples
of t/a suffixes which cooccur. But by and large, it seems to be a good
generalization that t/a suffixes don't cooccur with SR suffixes.

> >  The little dictionary put out by Lila Wistrand Robinson is a
> >piece of crap. Jim Armagost did what he could to save it from complete
> >disaster but only partially succeeded.
>
> I tried using that to supplement Charney's book since it doesn't have a
> glossary; but I didn't have much luck.  It would have required far more
> time than it was worth for the project at hand.
>
> >I'm also not surprised you didn't get final features from Comanche (no
> >matter who described it). Final features in Comanche are completely
> >lexicalized and only make sense if you know the Shoshoni patterns;
>
> That's what Charney's kept saying.  Which really got annoying, because I
> felt like she was giving a historical discussion rather than a synchronic
> account.  Left me very clueless.
I should say that coming from a Shoshoni background, this doesn't
trouble me as much as it does you. Upon reflection, this is likely the
major drawback in Charney's description of the language--the over-
reliance on historical considerations to explain synchronic phenomena.
Come to think of it, I've never seen an adequate discussion of the
synchronic phonology of Comanche. A bright young scholar could make a
killing ... (as a professor of mine always used to say)

> > > In Eskimoan
> > > languages SR is part of the 3rd person agreement.
> >
> >Makes sense; it's only in the 3rd person where this becomes
> >potentially ambiguous, no?
>
> Not always.  In Mojave the reciprocal and reflexive are identical, and one
> way to distinguish them is through the use of SR.  Using same-subject means
> the sentence is reflexive, and the different-subject means the sentence is
> reciprocal.    Only the SR marking distinguishes "We killed ourselves" from
> "We killed each other."
>
> In Chickasaw you can get subsets of subjects.  "We think that we are tall":
> either both "we"'s could refer to the exact same set, or one "we" could be
> a subset of the other.  These can get distinguished by same-subject or
> different-subject respectively.
Neat. I'll remember that--Tepa also does not distinguish reflexive
from reciprocal; I may press SR into service.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu