The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to our understanding of how stress is assigned in SENCOTEN (a dialect of North Straits Salish). The stress system of the Salish languages has been traditionally thought of as being highly morpho-lexical. Montler (1986: 23) states that in SENCOTEN, roots and affixes are lexically specified for their stress properties. He claims that these roots and affixes are in a hierarchical relationship and compete with each other for stress assignment. However, in this thesis, I show that there is much less morpho-lexical stress in SENCOTEN than previously thought. The stress pattern of a high number of polymorphemic words, namely those that contain lexical suffixes, can be accounted for without resorting to a morphological hierarchy of stress. Instead, using an Optimality Theory analysis inspired by the work of Dyck (2004) and Kiyota (2003), I show that it is the weight distinction between full vowels and schwa that determines where stress will be assigned. In addition, I am able to show that metrical feet are grouped into trochees and that these trochaic feet are aligned to the right edge of the word.

The resultive and actual (imperfective) aspects in SENCOTEN, a dialect of North Straits Salish, have been previously considered to contain two separate actual and resultive morphemes (Montler 1986). In contrast, it is argued here that the SENOTEN resultive construction is a complex construction, built on an actual base by prefixation of stative [s-]. Both morphophonological evidence and morphosyntactic evidence for this claim are considered: resultives and actuals exhibit the same non-concatenative allomorphy, and they appear to be in complementary distribution with respect to argument structure. This thesis also considers the semantic aspectual properties of resultives, and suggests that the morphologically complex resultive is semantically compositional: it contains a [durative] feature contributed by the actual morpheme and a [static] feature contributed by the stative prefix.