LADLushootseedSemantics

All Transitives are Derived

Lushootseed is a Central Salishan language spoken in the Puget Sound region of what is now Washington State, USA. One hypothesis about Salishan languages is that all verb roots are intransitive (Intransitivity Hypothesis; Davis and Matthewson, 2009), the corollary is that all transitive verbs are derived. This phenomenon brings up questions about how to perspicaciously model the semantic reflexion of such transitivization processes: should we provide structures which build up transitive predicates hand-in-hand with the morphological rules which derive them from intransitive bases? Or should we "swap out" one predicate for another in the application of transitivizing lexical rules? RMRS (CITATION NEEDED) may provide a way to model the compositional structure of transitivizing lexical rules in a typed-feature structure based grammar. The purpose of this session is to present some data which motivate the use of RMRS and to discuss the application of RMRS principles in this context.

Quoting Beck (2009):

• What are transitive verbs in most languages are derived from a large set of monovalent patient-oriented (Hess 1995) radicals whose syntactic subject expresses the semantic PATIENT or ENDPOINT of an event rather than the AGENT. Consider (1):

1. a. ʔuɬič̓ čəd.
      ʔu-ɬič̓ čəd
      PFV-be.cut 1SG.SUB
      `I got cut with a knife.'
   b. ʔuɬič̓id čəd tə sqʷiqʷali
      ʔu-ɬič̓i-t čəd tə sqʷiqʷali
      PFV-be.cut-ICS 1SG.SUB INDEF hay
      ‘I started to cut hay (with a blade)’

• (Bates, Hess & Hilbert 1994: 146)

RMRS

Data

References

• Bates, Dawn and Hess, Thom and Hilbert, Vi (1994). Lushootseed Dictionary

• Beck, David. (2009). A taxonomy and typology of Lushootseed valency-increasing suffixes. International Journal of American Linguistics 75, 533–569.

• Beck, David. (2000). Semantic agents, syntactic subjects, and discourse topics: How to locate Lushootseed sentences in space and time. Studies in Language 24:2, 277–317.

• Beck, David. (1996). Transitivity and causation in Lushootseed morphology. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 41, 109–140.

• Davidson, Donald. (1967). "The Logical Form of Action Sentences". In Nicholas Rescher (ed.), The Logic of Decision and Action. University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 81--95.

• Davis, Henry and Matthewson, Lisa. (2009). TITLE OF ARTICLE HERE. 'Language and Linguistics Compass' REST OF CITATION HERE

• Dowty, David (1989). "On the Semantic Content of the Notion of 'Thematic Role'" In Gennaro Chierchia, Barbara H. Partee, and Raymond Tuner (eds.), Properties, Types and Meaning, II. pp 69--129

• Dowty, David (1990). 1990. "Thematic Proto-Roles and Argument Selection". Language. Vol. 67, No. 3, pp. 547--619

• Hess, Thom. (1993) "A schema for the presentation of Lushootseed verb stems". 'American Indian Linguistics and Ethnography in Honor of Laurence C. Thompson', University of Montana Occasional Papers on Linguistics no. 10, ed. by Anthony Mattina, and Timothy Montler, 113–27. Missoula, MT: University of Montana.

• Parsons, Parsons, Terrence (1995). Thematic Relations and Arguments. Linguistic Inquiry. Vol. 26, No. 4 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 635-662