Semantic agents, syntactic subjects, and discourse topics
How to locate Lushootseed sentences in space and time
David Beck | University of Toronto
The Salishan language Lushootseed has been claimed to lack both syntactic subjects and morphosyntactically transitive clauses, a problematic stance from a universalist/typological point of view. This paper offers evidence both for the syntactic role of subject in Lushootseed and the existence of transitive clauses, and examines the sentence- and discourse-level properties of Lushootseed subjects that make them essential for the grounding of events and discourse in both space and time. Their centrality to the discourse-organization of the language, and hence their recoverability, allows their frequent — and, in transitive clauses, obligatory — elision from the surface form of sentences.
Published online: 06 September 2000
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.24.2.03bec
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.24.2.03bec
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Janic, Katarzyna
2021.
In Antipassive [Typological Studies in Language, 130],
► pp. 249 ff. 
Janic, Katarzyna & Alena Witzlack-Makarevich
2021.
In Antipassive [Typological Studies in Language, 130],
► pp. 1 ff.
Lindström, Liina
2015.
In Subjects in Constructions – Canonical and Non-Canonical [Constructional Approaches to Language, 16],
► pp. 141 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.