Animacy in phrasal verbs of position (Northern Dialect)
I’ve spoken often enough about how, despite people’s ignorant presumptions about pidgin-creole languages, there’s lots of reflection of grammatical animacy in Chinuk Wawa.
For instance, my dissertation showed that the only previously identified 3rd-person pronouns,the singular yaka ‘(s)he’ & the plural tlaska (Southern spelling: ɬaska), are in practice animate. They’re nearly always used only for people, and major animals. When we have to refer back to an inanimate 3rd person, we tend to use the “silent IT” — no word at all, you might say.
…Kaiyooti yaka lei-doun kopa oihat… (image credit: EurekAlert)
Now, thanks to our participants in the free Zoom sessions that I give, this little set of English-derived common words in the Northern Dialect has come into focus:
- fal-doun ‘to fall’
- lei-doun ‘to lie (down)’
- sit-doun ‘to sit’
This group shows plenty of animacy effects as well. They usually are marked by the animate pronouns yaka / tlaska.
We can say in addition, from my database of all issues of Kamloops Wawa, that:
- The subjects that can fol-doun are about 95% humans, plus the occasional star or tree or apple.
- Lei-doun also normally has a human subject, plus some animals, and once, the Chinook-Peipa letter”t”,which looks like _ .
- Sit-doun has human subjects, with practically no exceptions.
Another angle on this:
- Humans lei-doun / sit-doun, while inanimate things mitlait (‘be.there’).
- Fal-doun is just slightly more complicated, because we have no alternative verb to use specifically for inanimate things falling — although chako kopa ilahi (‘come to the ground’) / chako keekwuli (‘come down’) are used, too.
Part of this picture is, these are comparatively recent loans from English into Northern Chinook Jargon. (Check out how lei-doun sounds the same as normal Pacific NW talk: I always told my dog, “Go lay down”, not the literary *”Go lie down”*.)
Like every other word of the pidgin-creole CJ, they drag along traces of how they were used in their source language.
At least lay down and sit down, in English, were already limited to +Animate Subjects.
Normal, mentally healthy people, don’t say that (for example) a rock “laid down” or “sat down”!
(Am I saying that writers of poetry have a screw loose, then?) 😁
Consider, too, the Causativized forms of the preceding 3 verbs:
In line with all I’ve been saying, I find it easy to track down instances of mamook-lei-doun (‘to have someone lie down; to lay them down’) & mamook-sit-doun (‘to have someone sit; to seat them’). Not so with *mamook-fol-doun* — I’m not sure it’s an existing form!
Here we can mention another English “phrasal verb” loan: get-op (‘get-up’). Again, it’s almost exclusively humans and major animals that get-up. This, too, mirrors usage within English.
Still another verb that we chatted about in this light in our Zoom call was mitwhit ‘to stand; to stand up’. This is another more or less animates-only verb of position, except for the occasional mitwhit stik (‘(standing) tree’) or mitwhit ston (‘standing rock’). However, in its Causative form mamook-mitwhit ‘to stand something/somebody up vertically’, there’s a wrinkle. You have to be a human, I think, to mamook-mitwhit an object, but that standing object can then be either inanimate or animate.
Yup, Chinuk Wawa is a language, with rules.
