Verb + RESULT: syntactic iconicity, motion, information…

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Sometimes, Adverbs can’t come before the verb.

That’s when the Adverb expresses the state resulting from the Verb.

Word salad (image credit: Wikipedia)

Syntactic iconicity in action!

By this, I mean when you say things in the chronological order in which they occur, such as “go outside” (first you go, then you’re outside).

I feel sure this comes to my mind because I was recently writing about the Northern Dialect’s verbs of position that come from English-language phrasal verbs: lei-doun, sit-doun, fal-doun. (And trying to judge all dialects’ get-up in the same way.)

Well, anyhow, once again I’m just gonna dump this in public & encourage Linguistics students to write it up for college credit or publication:

In all dialects, in pairings of transitive verbs of motion + Adverbs, we can say (here in spellings reminiscent of LN St Onge’s for the Central Dialect) —

  • mamuk(-mitlait) tlahani / mash tlahani “put/throw out”,
    but not *tlahani mamuk (mitlait) / *tlahani mash
  • mamuk(-mitlait) saia / mash saia “put/throw far away”
    but not *saia mamuk (mitlait) / *saia mash
  • mamuk(-mitlait) kikuli / mash kikuli “put/throw down”
    but not *kikuli mamuk (mitlait) / *kikuli mash
  • mamuk-hal sahali  “hoise” [hoist]
    but not *sahali mamuk hal

Which I mention because roughly 90% of the time, Adverbs in Chinuk Wawa can be placed pretty freely in any of 3 positions. (Sentence-first, pre-Verb, post-Verb.) Without making any explainable difference of meaning.

So it’s wild to find instances where some Adverbs occupy rigidly defined slots.

Iconic, because first you put/throw, then it’s outside/far away/below/above.

Speaking of iconic syntax & result states,

I’ve been pondering 2 or 3 other phrases in St Onge’s data on Central Dialect that I find to be only borderline acceptable. They feel English-language-influenced to me, and I’ve not found their parallels in anyone else’s data.

(I don’t think they can be traced to St Onge’s French; there you say e.g. for ”paint it black!’: “peins-le en noir” — literally ‘paint it in black’.)

These have the resultant state of a Transitive action expressed as an Adjective:

  • mamuk-pent tkop “whitewash” (i.e. to paint until it’s white)
  • mamuk-tlkop wek-iakesilh “pare” (that is, to cut until it’s short [not long])

Anyhow, whatever their authenticity or acceptability, these expressions too obey a restriction I’ve pointed out — I’m dead sure no real speaker of Chinuk Wawa would ever say *tkop mamuk-pent or *wek-iakesilh mamuk-tlkop for the intended meanings.

In fact all of the asterisked forms above strike me as so difficult for a speaker to parse that they would sound like word salad.

PS: adding this St Onge form from another post I recently published:

  • mamuk k̂ow kwotl
    ‘tighten’ (“to tie up until tight”)

Bonus fact:

Conceptually similar are expressions involving k̂ilapai (which is literally “return; go/come/turn back”). These have a nice split going on, where:

  1. As above, you can tack k̂ilapai at the end of verbs, thus functioning again as an adverb (which is new news to add to your Chinook Jargon dictionaries; I’ve got a million of ’em):*
    A. chako k̂ilapai = ‘come back’,
    B. potlach k̂ilapai = ‘give back’;
  2. But also, you can put k̂ilapai before anohter word to generate an idiom, but that feels like a non-adverbial use of k̂ilapai to me, and instead like the full verb ‘to return’:
    A. k̂ilapai wawa = ‘answer’ (‘to return words’ or ‘to return-talk’),
    B. k̂ilapai tumtum = ‘change one’s mind’ (‘to (re)turn one’s mind’ or ‘to return-think’).

Interestingly, for #1 there’s a strong preference for (at least implied) motion, and, nobody says *k̂ilapai chako* or *k̂ilapai potlach*! — I checked a big database to be sure.

And for #2 there’s a great tendency to involve informational events, and, folks don’t say *wawa k̂ilapai* or *tumtum k̂ilapai*. I checked the same database about this 🙂

Final thought: for some speakers some of the time, it feels more right to avoid k̂ilapai in favour of wuht ‘again’. (And to simply say wawa for ‘answer’.) The Northern Dialect seems to do this especially often.

* I was surprised to realize there’s no mention of “k’ilapay-wawa” (meaning ‘to answer, reply, respond’) in the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary or the GR Reference Lexicon. It’s an incredibly frequent expression in actual speech.

𛰅𛱁‌𛰃𛱂 𛰙𛱁𛱆‌𛰅𛱁 𛰃𛱄𛰙‌𛰃𛱄𛰙? qʰáta mayka tə́mtəm? kata maika tumtum?  Qu’en penses-tu?  What do you think?

And can you say it in Chinuk Wawa?

 

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