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
No author info given
2021.
In Antipassive [Typological Studies in Language, 130],
No author info given
2021.
In Antipassive [Typological Studies in Language, 130],
Lindström, Liina
2015.
In Subjects in Constructions – Canonical and Non-Canonical [Constructional Approaches to Language, 16],
► pp. 141 ff.
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