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Spelling Out Object Agreement in Central Salish
Academic Work
Salish languages mark object agreement following the use of one of several “transitivizer" suffixes. Both object agreement marking suffixes and transitivizers exhibit allomorphy, with the form of an object suffix potentially being sensitive to the preceding transitivizer, and the transitivizer potentially being sensitive to a following object suffix. Analyses of third person objects often feature an empty cell for third person objects, with a specific form of transitivizer for third person objects (Newman 1979, Kroeber 1999). Under such an analysis, the limited control and causative transitivizers must be analyzed as -n@xw and -stxw) with an (unmarked) third person object, respectively, and as -n and -st before other suffixes, respectively. In this paper, we examine the allomorphy found across the transitivizer and object agreement suffixes in Central Salish languages. We build on analyses previously proposed for Upriver Halkomelem (Galloway 1977, Wiltschko 2003), Squamish (Jacobs 2011), and Comox-Sliammon (Mellesmoen 2017), arguing in favour of overt third person analysis of object agreement in which the (@)xw component of third person object limited control and causative forms is in fact a suffix. Taken together, and in direct comparison, these languages lend support for overt third person object marking; it is more economical to posit that (some of) the locus of allomorphy in transitivizer-object pairs can be attributed to a non-null third person agreement suffix. Furthermore, we argue that the overt form -xw is the elsewhere case in each of the three Central Salish languages (Upriver Halkomelem, Squamish, and Comox-Sliammon), and that true instances of null third person object agreement are conditioned by one of the specific transitivizing suffixes (the ctr -t). The rest of the paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we present relevant background on transitivity in Salish. We then present object agreement paradigms in three Central Salish languages (Upriver Halkomelem, Squamish, and Comox-Sliammon) in Section 3 and patterns of allomorphy in the object suffixes in Section 4. In Section 5, we detail our analysis of object suffix and transitivizer allomorphy. Section 6 concludes.
AW.00149
2021
Language and Linguistics
Proceedings of the 37th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
79-88
79-88
Article
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