Function of CW’s “silent” PREPosition, and a possible source of it
I’ve long pondered, why do fluent Chinuk Wawa speakers often leave out the preposition, kʰapa/kopa?
Another linguist’s idea, not mine (image credit: ResearchGate)
Thinking about a similar alternation, in 3rd-person pronouns, led me to realize there’s a pronoun “Ø” (silent IT) in this language.
So, is there a similarly meaningful reason for the preposition, “silent TO”?
1. Destinations
The “Ø” preposition is most noticeable with verbs of motion to a destination.
This phenomenon already shows up early in the available documentation of the Jargon. Honoré-Timothée Lempfrit’s 1849 manuscript, copying a lost ms. by François-Norbert Blanchet, has instances of it, such as
- tlatoa (Ø) sahalé ‘to go up’
- tlatoa (Ø) kikoulé ‘to go down’
We could think of the above 2 examples as involving adverbs ‘up’ and ‘down’, but I need to point out that people also say …kopa sahalé & …kopa kikoulé to mean ‘upward’ and ‘downward’.
When the direction of motion is expressed by a what’s clearly a noun, the “silent TO” is more obvious. Lempfrit also has these:
- tlatoa Ø éléhé ‘to fall’ (literally ‘go earth’)
- mash Ø éléhé ‘to drop / throw to the ground’ (literally ‘throw earth’)
- there’s also nayka mán ɬátwa Ø kálibu*
‘My man’s gone to Cariboo’
(from a BC song), and - máyka wík łátwa Ø sáxali-táyí
‘You will go to God.’
(from Oregon’s Grand Ronde area)
Similar expressions are to be found in Demers, Blanchet, & St Onge 1871, which is also based on Blanchet’s circa 1838 notes.
Contrast with actually pronouncing the preposition, as in tlatoa kopa etc.
I hypothesize that the “null preposition” is reserved for motion goals that are:
- less closely connected to one particular occasion
- more intuitively conceptually connected with the act of going
- less definite
- less visible
- less individuated
…than we find of kopa goals such as kopa kanewe elehi ‘to every country’ and kopa Lempel ‘to Hell’.
That is, ‘going Ø place’ is perhaps roughly paraphrase-able in English as ‘place-going’. (As if the goal were “incorporated” into the verb, as many languages do.)
2. Locations
We also notice “silent PREPOSITION” with location expressions. Here are a couple of examples from previous posts on my website:
- hayas-ɬúsh kʰáfin* míɬayt Ø mayka háws;
‘It’s preferable that the coffin stays at your place.’ - Ø sayá-íliʔi náyka míłayt álta.
‘It’s a far-away country that I’m in now.’
(from another BC song, using fluent CW “fronting” of a highly topical point) - Yaka míməlus Ø Kałámat-ílihi.
‘He died in the Kathlamet area.’
(from the Grand Ronde region)
I would guess that the null-preposition locatives are also instances where the location is more integrated into the “being”, more of a characteristic setting than a specific location, and so on. (Thus approximately ‘far-away-country-being’, etc.?)
The comparison with the incorporating of goals and locations into the predicate brings to mind SW Washington Salish languages. Part of the fundamental source structure of Chinuk Wawa comes from those languages — which, like other Salish, routinely use what are called “lexical suffixes” to incorporate various verbal arguments such as goals & locations. Being suffixal, these come after the predicate, so they’re in essentially the same sentence position as CW’s Ø preposition + noun structures.
Hmmm….
