HCE Candidates SMALL .1 Primitive Syntax

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5.28.2 HCE Candidates

There are four candidates for SMALL in HCE are: smaw, lido, manini, and smawlido. Manini has a negative connotation, somewhat like skimpy or petty. Another candidate of interest is smawlido. In these examples, smawlido is used to describe small, innocuous things, functioning somewhat like a diminutive. ER:762 When you get good luck, you catch plenty fish, eh. And you make plenty money, eh. So you make one small-little party for the workingmen. But before they eat, they cut the head, they throw ’em inside the water. ER:789 Sometime inside the meat, sometime when you kill too, the meat get da kine TB. So I ask him, “How come you know if the meat get TB?” He said you look by the liver. The liver, you know, when you kill, just like small little puss. ER:842 By hand, yeah. By hand and they cook the tar, put tar on top when they was making the road. And so those Japanese, they work hard. They smart how they work the road. You know, they cut the stone only with the hammer and small little stuff. When you look, easy, they make ’em straight, yeah, all the stone. Just like carpenter. They know the grain of the lumber, how the way lumber run, just like they know the stone, how the grain run. FD:271 Well, they call that popolo. You know those leafy things, eh? They have that small little purple seed. And then, they just pound that and then squeeze it. And then you drink the juice. Even the shoots, that’s how they pick up. Like this, you just pick ’em up, you know, so much, one handful. And then you go home, put in the cheesecloth or whatever, as long it’s clean. Then you pound that. But some, they put in the ti leaf then they heat ’em up. TA:35 In the olden days, not like small little paper, your birth certificate. YA:1034 I don’t know now. And no more road, those days, you know. Only one small little horse buggy road, you know. You know where the Hawaiian Memorial Park? The two best candidates are then smaw and lido. There does not appear to be any obvious semantic differences between the NSM primitive SMALL and the appropriate senses of these forms. It is interesting, however that there are no examples in our corpus of predicative lido. Furthermore, lido appears to be used by used less frequently and by a narrower range of speakers 11 speakers as opposed to 18 than smaw. It is sufficiently widespread to be a possible allolex for some speakers, however the more dominant form is definitely smaw.

5.28.3 Examples of smaw