🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan21.052233.17711@trl.oz.au>, jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy) writes:

[...]

> points of grammar: in certain types of phrases, you cannot distinguish
> between subject and object. The only other language I know of that
> does that, and is famous for it, is Lisu, spoken somwhere in Nepal,
> is memory serves..

As far as I have been able to determine, for at least some speakers
Winnebago, a Mississippi Valley Siouan language spoken in Wisconsin
and Nebraska, regularly tolerates lack of any grammatical distinction
in transitive clauses between agent and patient.  When I did my
fieldwork I devoted some time to pinning this down, and my speakers
concluded that in clauses like

	A B struck
	B A struck

considered in isolation from any context, or in contexts which did not
disambiguate them, both remained ambiguous; i.e. there was no unmarked
interpretation.  The language is verb-final with no morphological
marking of case or role.  Either construction above, however, can be
disambiguated by positioning a third-person pronoun after the agent:

	A 3-p-pron B struck (A struck B)
	B A 3-p-pron struck (A struck B)
	A B 3-p-pron struck (B struck A)
	B 3-p-pron A struck (B struck A)

We will have to consult John Koontz on whether this happens elsewhere
in Siouan (John, where are you?)

-Ken 
-- 
miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu | Nobody can explain everything to everybody.
opinions are my own      | G. K. Chesterton