A Comparative conceptual grammar of Bella Coola and Lushootseed
Date
1995
Authors
Beck, David James
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Abstract
Bella Coola and Lushootseed are two members of the Salishan family of Native American languages spoken in British Columbia and northern Washington State; Lushootseed is a part of the fairly numerous Coast-Salish branch of the family while Bella Coola, although spoken by a coastal culture, represents a phylogenetic isolate and is perhaps the oldest offshoot of the Salishan group (Kroeber 1991). Although these two languages have been previously treated as being highly divergent, a good degree of underlying similarity is revealed by the development of a unified framework for the description of their grammars in terms of the morphosyntactic and communicative strategies they employ in the expression of meaning.
The first section of the thesis is an enumeration and characterization of the lexical categories of the two languages, including the conceptual nature of verbs, nouns, and nominalized clauses. The second section outlines and compares their syntactic structures, including the canonical simple clause, various types of relative and relative-like clauses, and verbless sentences. The analysis of these last constructions shows how the thematic structure of the sentence (Halliday 1970) determines the speaker's choice of syntactic structures, with the most salient aspect of the event being accorded most-prominent (predicate) status. Also central to the discussion is the nature of deictics in these languages, which appear to function both as pronouns and the heads of nominals. Together with the thematic structure, the nature of deixis influences discourse, topic-selection, and other areas of the grammar such as the semantics of relativization and the propositional structure of NPs. In addition, attention is paid throughout the discussion to the on-going debate on certain controversial topics in Salishan-particularly those of predicate structure of verbless sentences (Kinkade 1983), noun/verb distinctions (Kinkade 1983, van Eijk & Hess 1986), and transitivity (Hess 1994)-and some effort is made to draw cross-linguistic parallels which are often lacking in the Salishan literature, which has hitherto favoured language-specific analyses and idiosyncratic terminology over the elucidation of more generalizable principles that govern a wide range of languages.