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
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/8056 |
| Date | 03 May 2017 |
| Creators | Willett, Marie Louise |
| Contributors | Saxon, Leslie Adele, Czaykowska-Higgins, Ewa |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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