Non-incorporating post-positions
In general, post-positions in Tolowa do not appear directly on the object noun, but — even when the noun is present — tend to incorporate an anaphoric pronoun (or its morphophonemic trace) as prefix. If they were indeed serial verbs, as I suggest, they thus presumably carried their object pronominal prefix.
Consider first the benefactive-a with its wide range of pronominal prefixes:
(1)
(2)
Quite often, the post-position (and its anaphoric pronoun) are detached from the object noun, as in:
(3)
Example (3) also illustrates the fossilization of the proximate 3rd-singular pronoun mu=- with the post-position, a common feature in Tolowa.
Consider next the associative post-position-la ‘with’, again with a wide range of pronominal prefixes, as in:
(4)
(5)
The post-position-la may have been derived from a perfective stem of ‘be’ (-le,-la,-li¸), as in:
(5)
