The Value of "pi"

Sara Trechter

Department of English, CSU-Chico

Abstract

Plurality in the Mississippi Valley Siouan languages is typically marked with a clitic in post-verbal position (Lakhota -pi). Although this morpheme has been traditionally translated as a distributive plural in association with either the agent or patient, its meaning is actually comitative, meaning that that action of the verb to which the morpheme attaches was accomplished "with others." This is exemplified by the fact that in Lakhota, in a few rare instances, the topical agent of the sentence is singular and the verb is "plural":

winyan ni-thawa kin phehinzhi-la thi el a-wicha-khiyagla-pe-lo

Your wife (with others) took them to Little Light-haired-one's place.

This paper traces the functional development of a reconstructed verb meaning "to be with" in the MVS languages as it grammaticizes in different discourse constructions to indicate verbal plurals and or topic.  As the comitative is used regularly with singular arguments such as in the Dhegiha languages, it comes to indicate the topic status of the singular agent or patient.