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Remarks on Proto-Salish Subject Inflection

Academic Work

This paper re-examines the morphosyntactic status and distribution of Proto-Salish subject pronominal markers. As such, it is meant as a contribution to the tradition of work embodied by Hoard (1971), Newman (1979, 1980), and Kroeber (1991). The principle claims to be defended here are the following:

Proto-Salish had three clitic and one suffixal subject pronominal series, with the latter strictly confined to transitive sentences. This situation closely approximates that of the contemporary Northern Interior language Thompson.
In the Proto-Salish system, subject suffixes consistently co-occurred with an impersonal third person clitic taken from one of the three subject clitic series. Thus, transitive clauses invariably contained two inflectionally encoded subject positions. This pattern can be still observed to varying degrees in all Northern Interior and most Central Salish languages.

The paper is structured as follows. In section 1, I review previous comparative work on Salish subject inflection, and revise it in two respects. First, I demonstrate that the Proto-Salish possessive subject series consisted of clitics rather than affixes; and second, I argue that Proto-Salish had a previously unrecognized conjunctive clitic subject series.

In section 2, I turn to the distribution of the Proto-Salish subject pronominal series, and show that once we adopt the two-subject hypothesis for transitive clauses, the apparently skewed system of Proto-Salish subject inflection can be shown to be quite symmetrical, with intransitive subjects consistently represented by subject clitics and transitive subjects by a combination of impersonal subject clitics and subject suffixes.

Creators Henry Davis

IdentifierAW.00102

Date1998

ThemesLanguage and Linguistics

Publication DetailsUBC Working Papers in Linguistics Press
International Conference on Salish Languages, 33, 91-107

KeywordsProto-Salish, Salishan languages, Central Salish, Northern Interior, subject inflection

GenreWorking Papers

URLhttps://lingpapers.sites.olt.ubc.ca/icsnl-volumes/

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