Chinuk Wawa isn’t “Nominative-Accusative” nor “Ergative-Absolutive”

Fluid-S, because if you support today’s idea, you might urge me to “add oil!” (image credit: Puuilo.fi)
This is either a trivial point or a huge one.
In linguistic typology, there’s general agreement that our data on the 7,000-ish known languages shows they fall into just 3 broad sorts, based on how they mark:
- The 2 core roles in a Transitive clause, which are always differentiated from each other:
- Who or what does an action (Agent).
- What or who the action is done to (Object).
- And, the only role in an Intransitive clause (Subject), which is sometimes differentiated into sub-types.
The types of syntactic alignment
In one common type of languages, like English and French, Agents and Subjects are encoded in one way (with what are traditionally called “subject pronouns” by teachers of those languages), while Objects are encoded in a separate way (with “object pronouns”). In these NOMINATIVE-ACCUSATIVE languages [a label we get from traditional Greco-Latin grammar], you find (A+S) versus (O).
In a second type of language, also common worldwide, Agents are encoded in one way, while Objects & Subjects are shown differently — so in these ABSOLUTIVE-ERGATIVE languages [a needlessly fancy term!] it’s (A) versus (S+O).
In the interesting third type we’re concerned with, sub-types of intransitive Subjects are distinguished. You have Agent-like ones (S.a, as in ‘I’m watching’, where ‘I’ am in control of that action) (“unergatives” for some linguists), and Object-like ones (S.o, as in ‘I tripped’, where ‘I’ have no control over the action) (“unaccusatives” for some linguists). In these STATIVE-ACTIVE languages, you’d have Agent marking on the ‘watch’ verb, and Object marking on the ‘trip’ verb. So it’s (A+S.a) versus (O+S.o). Because they’re diagnosed by the division within their Subject system, these are also called SPLIT-S languages. The literature of linguistic research seems to suggest that SPLIT-S languages are pretty rare, but we have plenty of them in North America’s large Siouan family of languages, such as Lakota.
Where does Chinuk Wawa fit into this?
Now then — in my PhD dissertation, I characterized Kamloops (BC) Chinuk Wawa as a Nominative-Accusative language.
I’m having second thoughts! Yup, linguists can be wrong.
Based on a good deal of work I’m doing lately with Grand Ronde (Oregon) Chinuk Wawa, I’m seeing the Jargon more as a SPLIT-S (Stative-Active) language. To my knowledge this analysis hasn’t been put forth before, so I’ll try to explain why I think this way.
For starters, it’s easy to see that Transitive clauses in Jargon do distinguish do-ers from do-ees. Do-ers (Agents) come before the verb, and do-ees (Objects) follow. Their position in the clause — their “word order” — is their role-marker.
(Shop talk: This is where I tell “generative” linguists that they’re out of touch, if they think a relatively isolating language like Chinuk Wawa “has no marking” of arguments. It’s primarily because of syntax that CW speakers understand without fail what roles are being expressed in an utterance.)
And with Intransitive clauses, I had originally concluded that their only role (“argument”) is their Subject, which is obviously not an Object.
So I figured Chinook Jargon must be a (A+S) versus (O) language. That is, an ACCUSATIVE-NOMINATIVE language, much like the French and English components of its heritage.
But a major feature of Intransitive clauses in Jargon that I took little account of in that analysis is that word order matters within the Intransitive class too.
Briefly, let’s recall that Intransitive clauses in Chinook Jargon aren’t just the ones with obviously verbal predicates in them, like these have (Subjects will underlined):
(1) Wík-qʰə́nchi kʰəpít snás… (S.o) (read on to understand these abbreviations)
not-ever stop rain
‘It never stops raining…’ (‘The rain never stops…’)
(2) T’álap’as pi lílu łaska míłayt... (S.a)
coyote and wolf they live…
‘Coyote and Wolf lived (there)…’
[I analyze the łaska here as an “agreement marker” on the verb, not as a statement of the Subject.]
In both (1) & (2), the subjects of the verbs ‘stop’ and ‘live’ are easily seen to be marked, by virtue of their position before those verbs, as Agent-like.
Now, there are also lots & lots of Intransitive clauses where the predicate doesn’t look like a verb of action:
(3) Wík (t)k’úp-tílixam nayka álta. (S.o)
not white-person I now
‘I‘m not a White person now.’
(4) x̣ə́nłq’i ya pʰík’w. (S.o)
crooked his back
‘His back is crooked.’
In cases like these last two, you have the Subject being either identified (as a non-White person) or described (as being crooked).
Now, I’ve often worked with an idea that such clauses are using a “null copula”, a silent be-verb that I’ve symbolized with Ø.
But I’m moving steadily in the direction of feeling that that view, too, is unconvincing. (If you can’t call yourself into question, are you really alive?) 🙂
Let me explain that.
I do believe in “nulls”, but only when they’re in a “paradigm” — a complementary distribution with some provable non-null form having comparable function, as in the Jargon 3rd person pronoun system (where yaka covers the animates and Ø is the norm for inanimates).
The more I think about it, the more I realize that the supposed null be-verb is not in any such relation. There just isn’t any non-null form that also means ‘be [identified as / equated with]’ or ‘be [a certain quality]’!
This has consequences.
If there’s no “be-verb” for identifying & describing functions, one implied view is that the non-Subject portions of example sentences (3) & (4) are “stative verbs”.
That is, the nominal (t)k’úp-tílixam, by virtue of not having its other major role as an argument in a Transitive clause (–and there’s a complementary distribution, by the way–), is a verb stem meaning ‘to be a White person’.
And the adjectival x̣ə́nłq’i, due to its not being in its other major role as a dependent member in a noun phrase (–again there’s a statement of a complementary distribution–), is a verb root meaning ‘to be crooked’.
Following through with the theme of a paradigm of be-verb (“copular”) expressions, there indeed are special verbs in Jargon (just not nulls) for other senses of ‘existing’, for instance míłayt ‘be somewhere; exist’ and t’úʔan ‘have’. (Yes, ‘have’ is considered a copular verb by linguists.) Thus, a simple sketch of the copular system in this language would be:
-
- míłayt ‘be somewhere; exist’
- t’úʔan ‘have’
- (stative verbs) ‘be identified as’; ‘be described as’
(There are linguists who would instead analyze (3) & (4) as “verbless copular constructions” but I’ll pursue that no farther for now.)
If we entertain this idea of stative verbs being common in Chinuk Wawa (because if there are any, there are tons of them, as there are endless ways to identify or describe a Subject), a couple of questions emerge straightaway.
One question is, what else is there besides stative verbs? For a linguist, everything that’s not what we’ve called a stative verb is an “active verb”, and whether it’s transitive or intransitive, its Subject will be marked as S.a.
The second question is, how are stative-verb Subjects marked? Like Agents, or like Objects? Or…a logical possibility…both ways??
In both (3) & (4), the Subjects occur after the stative verbs, that is, in the same position as Objects, so we’d describe them as S.o. Compare this with the non-statives in (1) & (2), where we found S.o with ‘stop’ but S.a with ‘live’.
Many of my readers will be aware that subjects of statives don’t always have to pattern this way in Chinook Jargon. It’s totally okay to alter our examples & put the Subject first:
(3′) Nayka wík (t)k’úp-tílixam álta. (S.a)
I not white-person now
‘I‘m not a White person now.’
(4′) ya pʰík’w x̣ə́nłq’i. (S.a)
his back crooked
‘His back is crooked.’
But a number of known factors indicate that this alternative ordering of Subject first in a stative clause (thus S.a) is not considered the default / norm way to talk.
- I’ve heard it expressed a number of times that it sounds more like “White” talk, as it sticks to an English and French pattern.
- An evaluation by Grand Ronde’s language program has stated that elder speakers “often” used this S.a stative ordering, but that at least as often, they used the more distinctive Subject-last S.o ordering.
- And I hypothesize that a detailed examination of discourse and textual usage will show some significant portion of seeming S.a statives to in fact be “topicalizations” — moving the Subject away from a post-stative-verb position in order to highlight its relevance.
So we can argue that Subjects normally come after stative verbs, and thus are marked S.o.
And, so far, it sure looks to me like Chinuk Wawa could be a SPLIT-S language. That’s to say, it would seem as if certain verbs are active, and the rest are stative.
Branching off & going with the flow of this…
But now I’m going to repeat example clauses (1) & (2), so you don’t have so scroll so much while we refer back to them:
(1) Wík-qʰə́nchi kʰəpít snás… (S.o)
not-ever stop rain
‘It never stops raining…’ (‘The rain never stops…’)
(2) T’álap’as pi lílu łaska míłayt... (S.a)
coyote and wolf they live…
‘Coyote and Wolf lived (there)…’
Neither of the verbs here requires you to put the Subject just where we happen to find it in these examples. Take a look at (5) & (6):
(5) Álta ya kʰəpít. (S.a)
then she stop
‘Then she just quit.’
(6) …ánqati kwánsəm yaka míłayt sáx̣ali-táyí. (S.o)
…Distant.Past always he exist above-chief
‘…(since) long ago God has existed.’
[Again, I see an “agreement marker” yaka on the verb of (6), separate from the Subject sáx̣ali-táyí.]
The difference between the Subject placements in (1) & (5) strikes me as reflecting how the S.o rain has no control over stopping, whereas a human S.a “she” does control her up-and-quitting.
In a similar way, (2) & (6) differ from each other in that S.a Coyote & Wolf have control over where they reside, whereas anything that exists — even including the S.o Creator!! — can’t have chosen to come into being. The difference is “Agent” versus “non-Agent” status.
So, did you notice? — Examples (1-2) & (5-6) show us a further interesting wrinkle. These are pairs of clauses built on the same exact predicate, showing that it can have either an Agent-like or an Object-like Subject.
Here’s where I note that a subtype of SPLIT-S (and therefore rarer still?) is the “FLUID-S” language, where at least some of the intransitive predicates allow you this choice of S.a or S.o marking. In other words, unlike a SPLIT-S style of strict division, where some Intransitives mark their Subjects like Agents, and the other Intransitives mark Subjects like Objects, there’s an overlap zone. In such a “FLUID-S” language, you find the same verb able to function both ways. So e.g. the root/stem for ‘fall’, marked with A, will mean ‘throwing yourself down on the ground’, and marked with O, it’ll mean ‘accidentally fall’ or ‘be dropped’ by someone.
So I’m thinking, unexpectedly, that Chinook Jargon is a FLUID-S language.
Thanks to some work by Henry Zenk and Tom Larsen that has come my way and inspired today’s post, I further speculate that there are additional grammatical structures in the Jargon that back up this view. I’ll have to write about those soon.
Origins?
As a practitioner of “linguistic archaeology”, I always have to ask how Chinuk Wawa came to have a given feature.
It’s unclear to me whether your average FLUID-S language lets few or many verbs take advantage of this flexible Subject marking. Is there such a thing as an average FLUID-S language? In Chinuk Wawa, I’m not quickly finding many verbs that allow this kind of choice, although more such may turn up. The first place that occurs to me to go looking is at the set of verbs that involve potentially gravity-assisted motion. Huh? My reasoning is that these denote actions that easily could either occur by human choice, or by the laws of physics just doing their thing, e.g.:
- láx̣ ‘to lean, tip’
- yíx-yix ‘to be disoriented, reeling’
- x̣ə́ləl(-x̣ələl) ‘to move, shake, quiver’
- t’łə́x̣ ‘to tear, rip’
- t’sə́x̣ ‘to split’
- t’łə́p ‘to sink’
- t’ík-t’ik ‘to drip’
It remains to be seen whether we have sufficient documented examples of each of these to judge whether any of them allow FLUID-S marking choices.
By contrast, in a language of the Caucasus Mountains, Tsova-Tush a.k.a. Bats, a check of 303 intransitive verbs with fluent speakers showed that about two-thirds easily allow this fluidity!
My hunch, awaiting further research, is that Salish languages such as the Southwest Washington ones that helped form Chinuk Wawa, are comparable with Tsova-Tush. It’s pretty easy to use a given Salish base form with either Transitive or Intransitive inflection (in this case, shown by affixes). I know that certain linguists have been investigating questions of “unergativity” and “unaccusativity” in sister languages for several years, mainly in Central Coast Salish. So I suspect that SW WA Salish may turn out to be an excellent historical model (source) for Chinuk Wawa’s FLUID-S syntactic alignment.
As with so many of these “historical source” questions, it will be harder work to determine whether the less well-described Chinookan languages can be seen as FLUID-S. That family certainly has been described as “ergative” languages instead, for many years, but as pioneering researcher of ABSOLUTIVE-ERGATIVE systems RMW Dixon takes care to point out (as in §2.5 “Avoid Sloppy Terminology” of his 2010 “Basic Linguistic Theory” textbook), the word “ergative” is very often misused.
What do you think?
PS — some of my logic-oriented readers may be thinking, there are other possible combinations of the role-marking we’ve been talking about.
- Yes, sure enough, there are indeed languages where S, A, and O are all clearly distinguished from each other by unique grammatical markings (but this is rare, and I understand it’s usually limited to some small sub-area in the grammar of one of the above language types — e.g. it’s confined to 3rd persons in the Peruvian language Cashinawa).
- And yes, some languages are said to not differentiate the marking of S, A, and O from each other at all, e.g. Thai, which leaves it to your grasp of context to figure out those roles; this too seems rare.
- Finally, I should specify that even though Subject can be subdivided into “S.a” and “S.o” subtypes, no known language arranges (S.a+O) versus (A+S.o) marking, just as no language marks (A+O) identically. It’s utterly fundamental to all human speech, and by implication thought, that we distinguish “do-ers” from “do-ees”.
Very little indeed is fundamental to all human speech. Reportedly, there are languages, apparently in the Pamir somewhere, that put agents and patients in the “transitive case” but experiencers in the “intransitive case”.
Missing from that beautiful short introduction are two things that come to mind:
1) Direct/inverse languages. Those start from assuming an animacy hierarchy, for instance (from what I’ll call “up” to “down”) 1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person human, nonhuman animate, inanimate count noun, inanimate mass noun. Actions that go down the animacy hierarchy get the “direct” marker on the verb (or none at all), actions that go up get the “inverse” marker. Thus, “I see you” may come out as “I you see-DIR”, “you see me” as “I you see-INV”.
(Many such languages additionally use verb agreement with person and case, and sometimes case-marking on the nouns on top, e.g. “I.ERG you.ABS see-1ERG.2ABS-DIR”. But, AFAIK, not all do.)
2) Languages that mark something similar but different. Look no further than Chinese. At first glance, Modern Standard Mandarin looks like a nominative/accusative language that puts agents and experiencers before the verb and patients after it, but no: it puts topics before the verb and comments after it. Topics are usually subjects and comments are usually objects, but not always, and on rare occasions the results can look very weird from a Standard Average European perspective.
(BTW, comment-topic-verb word order Yodaspeak has, object there be or no object.)
As far as I understand things, both topic-comment stuctures and direct-inverse structures are compatible with any syntactic alignment, i.e. with any system of A/S/O role marking.
Other than the reputed exception of Thai, I’m not much aware of any languages that lack a syntactic alignment (but have topic-comment and/or direct-inverse going on).
Thanks for the link re Pamir languages, I’ll check it out with great interest!
I’ll repeat for the benefit of anyone who needs me to, Chinuk Wawa doesn’t have affixal (though you can easily argue it has cliticized) pronominal argument marking — which is precisely why it so strongly leans on constituent order to accomplish precisely that function. It’s definitely not a language that lacks marking of syntactic roles; to claim that would be a howler of a mistake. (Which I’ve seen endless linguists perpetuate without a further thought and without studying the language’s grammar.)
I want to tack on a thought that some Interior Salish languages (whose grammar I’m kind of rusty at) may be examples of the rare S vs. A vs. O type; I seem to recall that in Spokane for instance, 1st person singular S is čn=, A is -n, and O is -c???
Oh, I agree that (from what I know, which is just this blog post) CW is clearly a Fluid-S language. I was just passing on the report that languages which don’t mark any alignment even by word order, or mark a different kind of alignment, do exist. Unfortunately the page I linked to doesn’t cite sources, it’s just an overview over alignment in general, but writing to the author should help.
AFAIK, Nez Percé (not Salishan, I know) has tripartite alignment in some subset of the grammar, and there are Penutian sightings of the same or similar phenomena, so perhaps this is a vaguely areal thing…?
Very cool observation, David, I think you may’ve spotted something here that’s quite interesting. More research, as we say, is called for!
Forgot to mention:
Yes, but they don’t necessarily have any. Japanese has both a topic-marking and a nominative-marking clitic, so both topics and subjects can be marked in the same sentence when they’re not the same; Chinese marks topics by word order, and subjects not at all as far as I’ve noticed.
…and here’s a direct/inverse language that does not distinguish agents, patients or experiencers by inflection (they’re all zero-marked), word order or even the order of verb prefixes; the order instead follows the animacy hierarchy, so that “I saw him” comes out as 1sg-3sg.m-see-PAST while “he saw me” comes out as 1sg-INV-3sg.m-see-PAST.
Really intriguing, Dave. Yes, I think that I would expect 3 and 4, vs 3’ and 4’, as “default” WO from a fluent elder speaker, with the qualification that S can be fronted (often with accompanying accentuation) to call attention to it: “So who is it who isn’t a White person now?” – “ME – I’m not a White person now!” (kind of hard to imagine as a real-life exchange). For whatever my own L2 speaker’s intuition is worth, 4’ seems kind of incomplete to me even assuming fronted-topicalized S; I might rather expect: ya pʼikʼw x̣ənɬqʼi ukuk.
And one small demurrer. Most of the verbs you list under your “Origins?” section trace back to Chinookan verbal particles. Varying degrees of sound symbolism typify this word class in Chinookan. Phil Duncan, a linguist who has been working with the Wasco language program at Warm Springs, terms them “ideophones” (based I take it on parallels with similar-seeming lexemes in some African languages). The “ideophone,” in effect, extracts and fronts the semantic content of a verbal construction, leaving the subject-object relations of the verb to be spelled out in a following inflected form. E. g. (Clackamas Chinook Texts p. 215): čʼəx̣ i-kí-x̣-ax̣ ‘it was split’ : čʼəx̣ ga-g-í-u-x̣ ‘she (the sun) split it’. Now, I don’t know Salish anything like you know Salish, but even so, I’m not quite ready to consider this to be the “Salish Jargon.”
Henry, thanks much for commenting here!
I also considered Chinookan as a source model of Fluid-S syntax, for this same reason you note, that Chinookan has tons of these ideophones that it bequeathed to Chinuk Wawa. And yet, as far as my still-limited grasp on Chinookan morphosyntax takes me, it looks to me as if the Chinookan ideophones (A) don’t necessarily co-occur with verbs, and (B) the Chinookan verbs used in construction with the ideophones mark their Agents or Subjects independently thereof. That is, verbal S or A marking has nothing to do with ideophones.
Instead, I suspect it’s just that the kinds of events that are crosslinguistically liable to get encoded as ideophones — onomatopoeias — are these sorts of gravity-assistable plunks, plops, and woozes that I’ve gravitated to (see my joke there) as potential test cases for Fluid-S deployment. (And by corollary, certain sorts of events such as obligatorily conscious volitional acts — to write, to narrate, to insult, to decide — will be universally least likely to allow Fluid-S marking.)
Let’s not ignore that virtually any semantic type of verb root/stem in a language can theoretically allow Fluid-S treatment. So, beyond the ideophone-derived motions we’re talking about, the example sentences I’ve used in my article here show purely stative verbs (such as either nouns or adjectives when in ‘predicative’ use).
All in all, my preliminary take on potential source models for Fluid-S syntax in Chinuk Wawa (if it’s not just plain endogenous to CW, which is really possible) is that all parent languages except Salish look non-Fluid-S to me. French & English are strongly Nominative-Accusative, and from Boas’s “Illustrative Sketch” 1910:581 table of pronominal affixes, Chinookan looks Absolutive-Ergative, because Boas shows transitive subjects (A) versus intransitive subjects (S), the latter affixes also marking transitive objects (O).
Okay, I’m going to hit “SEND” because my blog keeps me in a teensy window for composing Comments. I’m sure I’ve already gotten lost here, since I can’t see my first few paragraphs of this note 🙂
Yes, Chinookan is usually classified as an absolutive-ergative language. Now, I’m on kind of thin ice here as far as my grasp of languages of the world, but as I understand it, an absolutive: ergative contrast is noted in Chinookan only for certain third-person pronominal prefixes. Chinookan is more properly classified as a “split-ergative” language. As for “ideophones”: that term might possibly be taken as a generic term for all Chinookan particles showing sound symbolism. A subset (the majority I believe) of those would be what Sapir termed particle verbs and Boas termed attribute complements. A Chinookan particle verb is (typically or usually) part of a two-part phrasal verb. E. g.: čʼəx̣ ga-g-í-u-x̣ ‘split past-3.sg.fem.ERG-3.sg.mas.ABS-directive-Verb (=/x̣ ‘make, do, become, be’) = ‘split did-she-it-there-do (she split it)’ [hmm, could sound symbolism be attributed to English “split”?]. /x̣ represents the phrase’s subject-object relations in abstract form; the semantic content of the verb is supplied by the particle. The verb would be incomplete without both parts. Dyk in his grammar distinguishes between transitive and intransitive verbal particles, based on their inherent meaning – much as we find in Chinuk Wawa. Not sure how all of this relates to your point! Calls for further investigation. But I do like where you’re going with this. It certainly gives food for thought.
I’ll come back to your newer comment to absorb it well. I just have a sec to note that “ergative” languages usually are “split-ergative”.
Also that I understand Chinookan “particle verbs” the way you do — the verb’s semantic content is supplied by the ideophone. The Agent or Subject marking resides in the verb. Sometimes there’s just an ideophone, and I believe we shouldn’t necessarily infer that a verb is intended in those cases.
The co-occurring verb could stand as a complete sentence (in the example: ‘she did him there’; the “it” in my parsed gloss is masc 3 sg absolutive), but never the ideophone (any more than any other particle). Something that I should have mentioned is that inflected nouns can stand as complete existential sentences in Chinookan: e. g. i-kaimamt ‘[masc-Sahaptin] he is a Sahaptin’; a-kaimamt ‘[fem-Sahaptin] she is a Sahaptin’; m-gwaɬilx ‘[2 sg-person] you are a person’. The nominal classificatory (number-gender) prefixes are similar in form to and agree with corresponding verbal pronominal prefixes (permitting concordance of verb and noun when both appear in a sentence, very characteristically Chinookan), but they aren’t 100% identical. Ergativity wouldn’t be relevant for understanding existential sentences based on inflected nouns anyway, would it?
And showing that I am not the world’s greatest Chinookan expert either, I didn’t include the other example with čʼəx̣ ‘split’ in my first comment because I wasn’t sure how to parse the accompanying auxiliary verb. On looking at the sentence in context I believe that this is how it works (qualification: I’m not the world’s greatest Chinookan expert): čəx̣ ∅-i-kí-x̣-ax̣ ‘[“split” present-3 sg masc absolutive-detransitive-Verb-usitative] it (he) is split’. Context I think supports this analysis. Both examples come in a myth dictation. čəx̣ ga-g-í-u-x̣ ‘she (the sun) split it’ shows the ga- tense prefix usually used in myths. Here, one of the myth actors has seen that it (he) is split (present tense, in context). Hope that I got that right!
One more thing that might be worth mentioning. When we are talking about the origin of Chinuk Wawa in its lower Columbia cradle, we must consider that many (perhaps most) of the brains that birthed it were bilingual (or multilingual) brains. Cultee himself, Boas’s Chinook proper and Kathlamet source, was also his Lower Chehalis source. Ideally, we should be able to bring in (and bring together) comparisons from both source languages.
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Chinese is much stranger than David M suggests even, because it is neutral as between syntactic accusatives and ergatives (the vast majority of morphologically ergative languages are syntactically accusative). “He dropped the watermelon and ran” is s.a., whereas “He dropped the watermelon and burst” is s.e., but they are equally cromulent in Chinese, whose speakers can glork from context alone that the man ran and the watermelon burst. This cannot be accounted for by topic-comment order either. (This insight is due to Randy LaPolla, but I have lost both the proper reference and the Chinese examples.)
A Chinookan particle verb is (typically or usually) part of a two-part phrasal verb.
This sounds much like some English constructions: John went poop in his diapers, for example, assuming we grant that poop is sound-symbolic. It certainly can’t be the noun, because *John went the poop, *John went poops. Clearly went “represents the phrase’s subject-object relations [and TAM] in abstract form; the semantic content of the verb is supplied by” poop.
(If you get the idea that I like typing poop in a serious linguistic discussion, you’re right.)
I really enjoyed this! I can’t believe I missed it when it first came out. Now I see what you were getting at that time when you asked me why I used the word order I did, and I told you it was from learning through going over the stories over and over. I was pretty confused as to how to explain but also was pretty certain I was speaking the right way there…. I started to wonder if what I was doing was influence from Nuxalk (which now that I look at this, I really do need to think about again) but seeing this everything makes perfect sense – the same with the fronting! that’s what I hear when you say it. This is just one more reason why I have to hurry up and find the time to learn duployan so I can start training my mind on some new material…
Seeing a new comment in this thread brings to mind an insight about ergative alignment in Chinookan that is missing from my previous comments. This “new” insight dawned on me upon encountering the example below in a paper co-authored by Phil Duncan, who has been consulting with the Wasco language program of Warm Springs, Oregon (the only tribal language program today dedicated to reviving a Chinookan language). I paste in the comments below from an email exchange with some fellow students of lower Columbia languages (Dave being one of them):
One thing that made me do a double-take in this little paper (of Duncan et al.) was the gloss of the verb in ex 2:
ni-ɬk-sh-t-x̣-a
PST-3PL.ERG-3DU.ABS-DIR-do-EP
What is with that ɬk- ERG and sh- ABS I thought? Took me awhile to put together the pieces, all of which I have had for a long time – only didn’t see how they fit together. ɬ- is the “neuter collective” (often used with PL ref), but what is that k-? Oh yes, that is the “post-pronominal g” that Boas says can be inserted between certain subject prefixes and following object prefixes to make the verb transitive. Took awhile for the light bulb to go on, but yes, adding the k (or g) to a preceding qualifying subject prefix turns that prefix into a transitive subject. I checked the grammars (Chinook proper, Kathlamet, Wishram) and see that the system is the same for all the described languages: post-pronominal k- attaches to the same restricted set of persons in all three. So as it turns out, Chinookan shows ergative alignment for all persons except 1 SG, 2 SG, indefinite. Before, I had thought of ergativity only in terms of the two persons with distinct ERG/ABS forms: masculine 3 SG and feminine 3 SG. Actually, Chinookan is a nearly perfectly ergative language!
To add to the above: the prefixes showing ergative alignment in Chinookan languages (including those with separate ergative forms + those combining with “post-pronominal k/g” are: 3 sing mas, 3 sing fem, 3 sing neuter-collective, 1 dual inclusive, 1 dual excl, 2 dual, 3 dual, 1 pl incl, 1 pl excl, 2 pl, 3 pl. Some of these persons are not well exemplified in the texts, but were verified by Boas and Dyk through paradigmantic elicitation.