In this thesis I discuss the semantic basis of the morphological form of predicates
in N+e?képmx, a Northern Interior Salish language. Intransitive and transitive use of
roots in Nle7képmx is morphologically marked; intransitives use a set of primary affixes
and transitives use a set of transitivizers. I document the behavior of these morpho
syntactic affixes with a subset of the predicates of Me?képmx to determine what is
optional, what is obligatory and what is blocked. I link this to an analysis of argument
structure of predicates and subsequently create a classification of predicate types.
I present an overview of the intransitive and transitive morphology of Meképmx
in Chapter One. In Chapter Two I discuss current literature regarding the syntactic and
semantic diagnostics of unaccusative and unergative verbs. I create a semantic
classification of the set of roots, and discuss the behavior of roots with morpho-syntactic
affixes to determine the diagnostic potential of the affixes. In Chapter Three I discuss the
potential of an intransitive-transitive classification of roots.
The data show that there is an unergative and unaccusative distinction in the
language, specific aspectual morpho-syntactic diagnostics distinguish unaccusatives and
causative and desiderative distinguish unergatives. The traditional analyses of Salish
languages as having a majority of unaccusative roots and no underlying transitives is
confirmed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/4981 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Howett, Catherine Dawn |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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