This dissertation is the first grammatical sketch of the Nxa’amxcin (Moses- Columbian) language. Nxa’amxcin is an endangered member of the Southern Interior branch of the Salish language family, a linguistic group indigenous to the Pacific Northwest region of North America. Building on previous work by other Salish linguists, I address to varying degrees all three major aspects of the grammar (phonology, syntax and morphology) from a Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology approach to word formation (Beard 1995). A brief introduction to the phonology of Nxa’amxcin provides a look at the segment inventory, the status of schwa, various segmental processes, and syllable structure. An overview of the syntax focuses on aspects of the noun phrase—determiners, demonstratives, locative prepositions, genitive marking—and the major clause types—simple clauses, relative clauses and fronting. An extensive discussion of lexical operations (derivational morphology) addresses the categories of valence, voice, secondary aspect, control, category-changing operations, and operations marking locative, augmentative, diminutive and relational. An overview of inflectional operations (inflectional morphology) is presented starting with the marking of person, number and grammatical relation on the predicate. Viewpoint aspect, mood, temporal marking, negation, non-declarative operations—yes/no questions, imperative, prohibitive—and nominalization are also discussed. A description of the three different types of compounds found in Nxa’amxcin—two involving free stems and the third (known as lexical affixation) comprising a free stem and a bound stem—is provided along with the corresponding word structure rules responsible for these compounds. A number of arguments in support of a compounding analysis of bound stem constructions (lexical affixation), as opposed to a syntactic analysis, are presented. The set of classifiers that has developed from lexical affixation is also addressed. / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.) - Univ. of Washington.

Coeur d'Alene, also known as Snchitsu'umshtsn, is a Southern Interior Salishan language no longer learned by children. Descriptive work on the language has been carried out since the early nineteenth-century (Tiet 1904 through 1909 in Boaz and Tiet 1930; Reichard 1927-29, 1938, 1939; Doak 1997); however, a formal account of the basic clause structure of this polysynthetic language has until now not been proposed. This thesis presents such a formal analysis within the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 1998, 2000, 2001a, 2001b; Lasnik 1999a, 1999b, 2000; among others), employing the tenets of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993; Harley and Noyer 1999; among others). Demonstrating that an analysis of person marking morphemes as bound pronouns (Jelinek 1984) is more "economical" in terms of Chomsky's (1995:367)Elementary Principles of Economy, the thesis goes on to account for the phenomena of lexical affixation (Carlson 1990; Kinkade 1998; Gerdts 2003; among others), in Coeur d'Alene as incorporation. Appealing to Hale and Keyser's (2002) theory of conflation as Head-movement (Harley 2004), an approach to incorporation is proposed which captures Chomsky's (1995) claim that head-movement is phonological while at the same time illustrating that lexical affixes in Coeur d'Alene serve as incorporated arguments. The thesis concludes with an articulation of the left periphery (material above vP here), based on the strict ordering of a series of mood, adverbial, model, and aspectual particles. It is shown that this articulation in Coeur d'Alene patterns with Cinque's (1999) proposed universal hierarchy of functional and adverbial heads. In this way, the basic clause structure of Coeur d'Alene is formally presented

This dissertation is an investigation of the stress system of Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), one of ten languages that make up the Central division of the Northwest Coast branch of Salishan, a linguistic group indigenous to the Pacific Northwest region of North America. Although other researchers have previously investigated aspects of stress in the language, this work provides the first integrated account of the Squamish stress system as a whole, couched in an Optimality Theoretic framework. The first two chapters are introductory, with Chapter 1 supplying a contextual background for the undertaking within linguistics, and especially within Salishan linguistices, while Chapter 2 provides a thorough grounding in the phonology and phonemics of Squamish in particular. Chapter 3 begins the formal analysis of stress in Squamish by examining the way stress surfaces in free root morphemes,which tend to stress penultimate syllables whenever they contain either a full vowel or a schwa followed by a resonant consonant. Given this outcome, Chapter 4 continues the investigation of basic stress patterns by looking more closely at the interactive roles of schwa, sonority, weight and the structure of syllables and feet in Squamish stress assignment. With the basic stress pattern established, the remaining chapters look at the outcome of stress in morphologically complex Squamish words. Thus, Chapter 5 is an analysis of stress in words involving prefixation, especially those resulting from CVC and CV prefixal reduplication, since non-reduplicative prefixes are unstressable; and Chapters 6 and 7 investigate the occurrence of stress in polymorphemic words resulting from the addition of lexical suffixes and grammatical suffixes, respectively. While stress in roots is generally predictable on the basis of phonological factors alone, that in polymorphemic words may also be influenced by morphological factors, as when a root or suffix has underlying lexical accent, and such factors then take precedence ofer phonological factors. In addition, prosodic domains play an important and interactive work.