Polysynthesis in Nuuchahnulth, a Wakashan Language
Abstract Nuuchahnulth is a Southern Wakashan language spoken in British Columbia, Canada. It is a verb-initial head-marking language and is almost exclusively suffixing morphologically. The language exhibits polysynthesis involving holophrasis but does not allow compounding. Instead, it has numerous...
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| Format: | Book Part |
| Language: | English |
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Oxford University Press
2017
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| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199683208.013.35 https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/40413/chapter/347387206 |
| Summary: | Abstract Nuuchahnulth is a Southern Wakashan language spoken in British Columbia, Canada. It is a verb-initial head-marking language and is almost exclusively suffixing morphologically. The language exhibits polysynthesis involving holophrasis but does not allow compounding. Instead, it has numerous suffixes with heavy lexical content, traditionally termed ‘lexical suffixes’. This lexical suffixation serves as the central mechanism in Nuuchahnulth for bringing multiple lexically heavy morphemes into a word. The complexity of actual polysynthetic words in this language seems rather limited compared to what is reported to be possible in Eskimo languages. There are cases where similar semantic content can be expressed either synthetically using a polysynthetic word or analytically as separate words. When such an alternation is possible, discourse-pragmatic considerations, particularly discourse referentiality of the object of the predicate, play a major role in the choice of constructions. |
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