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Five Sqwxwu7mish Futures
Academic Work
The goal of this paper is to establish that there are five principal ways in which the future can be expressed syntactically in SqwXwu7mish main clauses:
i. by the addition of a future temporal verb to what I will call the basic word order, that is, the auxiliary, inflected with first person agreement, followed by the verb, to create a "tenseless" future;
ii. by the inversion of this basic order, which is known as Verb Raising, such that the verb precedes the inflected auxiliary;
iii. by the addition of the future morpheme -eq' to the inflected auxiliary, which may precede or follow the verb;
iv. by the combination of the predicate nam', "go" with the inflected auxiliary/verb construction, which in some cases gives an inchoative reading; and
v. by the morpheme 7i, labelled PR (present) as per Jacobs 1992, which alone or with the temporal adverb chiyalh, "soon", expresses an inceptive future sense.
The first three will be discussed in some detail here, while only brief mention of the latter two will be made.
This paper will also show that the aspectual class of the predicate determines which of the strategies above can be employed to express future. Activity verbs, such as ilhen "eat" and ts'its'ap' "work", may use any one of the five, as can achievement verbs such as wi7Xw-em, "fall", and accomplishment verbs like mi-s "bring"; some differences in interpretation arise between aspectual classes in the same construction, however. In contrast, stative verbs, such as lhq'i7-s "know", do not use the verb raising strategy to express future, and probably do not employ the go future construction. Assuming the existence of verbs, noun, and adjectives as separate categories, only verbs will be considered here, primarily in the first person singular with some support from third person singular evidence; in addition, no distinction between affixes and clitics is specified.
i. by the addition of a future temporal verb to what I will call the basic word order, that is, the auxiliary, inflected with first person agreement, followed by the verb, to create a "tenseless" future;
ii. by the inversion of this basic order, which is known as Verb Raising, such that the verb precedes the inflected auxiliary;
iii. by the addition of the future morpheme -eq' to the inflected auxiliary, which may precede or follow the verb;
iv. by the combination of the predicate nam', "go" with the inflected auxiliary/verb construction, which in some cases gives an inchoative reading; and
v. by the morpheme 7i, labelled PR (present) as per Jacobs 1992, which alone or with the temporal adverb chiyalh, "soon", expresses an inceptive future sense.
The first three will be discussed in some detail here, while only brief mention of the latter two will be made.
This paper will also show that the aspectual class of the predicate determines which of the strategies above can be employed to express future. Activity verbs, such as ilhen "eat" and ts'its'ap' "work", may use any one of the five, as can achievement verbs such as wi7Xw-em, "fall", and accomplishment verbs like mi-s "bring"; some differences in interpretation arise between aspectual classes in the same construction, however. In contrast, stative verbs, such as lhq'i7-s "know", do not use the verb raising strategy to express future, and probably do not employ the go future construction. Assuming the existence of verbs, noun, and adjectives as separate categories, only verbs will be considered here, primarily in the first person singular with some support from third person singular evidence; in addition, no distinction between affixes and clitics is specified.
AW.00086
1996
Language and Linguistics
Papers for the International Conference on Salish Languages (ICS(N)L)
31,
31,
Copyright remains with the author.
Working Papers
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