The Punctual and Segmentative Aspects of Verbs in Hopi

Abstract

Verbs in the Hopi language are noteworthy for their very rich and expressive development of verbal aspects and voices. I shall say nothing in this paper of the nine voices (intransitive, transitive, reflexive, passive, semi-passive, resultative, extended passive, possessive, and cessative); and of the nine aspects (punctual, durative, segmentative, punctual-segmentative, inceptive, progressional, spatial, projective, and continuative) I shall deal with only two. It may be noted that there are no perfective and imperfective aspects; in fact Hopi does not in any way formalize as such the contrast between completion and incompletion of action. Its aspects formalize different varieties of the contrast between point-locus and extent-locus of phenomena, indifferently in time or space, or in both. Hopi also has three tenses: factual or present-past, future, and generalized or usitative. Hopi verbs belong to seven classes or conjugations having slightly different inflectional systems. Class 1, the largest and most creative class, contains a few categories not found in the other classes, among them the segmentative aspect. The simplex of the Class 1 verb is a bare root of the form CVCV, and is in the third person singular intransitive voice, punctual aspect, and present-past tense. The segmentative aspect is formed by final reduplication of this root plus the durative suffix -ta, and produces a change in the meaning of the simplex of the folloxving character: the phenomenon denoted by the root, shown in the punctual aspect as manifested about a point, becomes manifested as a series of repeated interconnected segments of one large phenomenon of a stretched-out segmental character, its extension usually being predominantly in one dimension, indifferently of space or time or both. The nature of the change can best be shown by examples. ha'ri it is bent in a rounded angle hari'rita it lies in a meandering line, making successive rounded angles (applied for instance to meander patterns in decoration)