Actively wrinkling Southern Dialect full-word reduplication
Time to update a post I wrote years ago, adding an insightful wrinkle.
I wrote that Southern Dialect (Grand Ronde creole) Chinuk Wawa has full-word reduplication of items “inflectable as” verbs.
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I’ve now edited that article.
This post is to point that fact out.
I’ve changed the wording there to include the insight that the innovative Southern Dialect reduplication validly & productively applies only to Active verbs. Not to Statives!
From the elders, we know we can say kúri-kuri “run around (etc.)” and nánich-nanich “be looking all around (etc.)”
(A nice contrast with the older Central Dialect is that there, we say nanich kaĥ kaĥ for “search; look all over the place”! The Central Dialect couldn’t reduplicate any verbs, mainly just adverbs.)
We don’t find reduplications like *míɬayt-miɬayt* (supposed meaning “sit all over the place”) nor *kə́mtəks-kəmtəks* (supposed meaning “know all kinds of things”).
This is a point in support of my analysis of Chinook Jargon as a “Fluid-S” Active vs. Stative language, where all predicates are either one or the other of those 2 categories. It’s as if I’ve found another diagnostic of ±Stative status.)
(I find this particularly interesting with *kə́mtəks-kəmtəks*, which I might have expected to be a valid Active verb, but apparently “knowing” is more purely a perception verb & thus a Stative than nanich “seeing”!)
Not sure how this affects your observation, but we do have munk-miɬayt-miɬayt = to arrange, place multiple objects. Of course, miɬayt when compounded with munk- becomes an active verb: put, place.
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