CLAUSE COMBINING IN NOOTKA 239although clauses modifying other clauses seem occasionally to occur.
Thirdly, cosubordination is common on all three levels of juncture. Clausal
cosubordination occurs as instances of clause chaining in narrative style.
Here it seems that the shared grammatical categories are projected forward
from the first clause of the sequence. One notes something of a mirror-
image relationship to the verb-final languages such as those mostly consid
ered by Van Valin (1984) (many exhibiting switch-reference), in which the
full grammatical specifications are found on the final predicate of the chain.
Sentence-introductory words seem to exhibit an asymmetrical form of
cosubordination, combining a core with a clause. Core cosubordination can
be found in the prepositional clauses used for focusing an argument or
adding an additional argument to a clause. And finally, the tightly knit
relationship of nuclear cosubordination is manifested in a common pattern
of verb serialization. Some concluding comments (section 13) try to place
these findings in functional and typological perspective, working toward a
generalized conception of clause chaining.
4. Analytic problems
As so many of the grammatical relationships in this language occur within
rather than between words, there seems sometimes to obtain a lack of
specificity in the marking of some inter-word connections. We have already
noted the absence of obligatory case marking on nouns. For example:^9
qatqsarp hawiiuk qwayacrk (22:2)
cut off head-CAus-3 chief-poss Wolves
in its context clearly means "he cut off the head of the Wolf chief", but
grammatically it could equally well mean "the Wolf chief cut off his head".
Other uncertainties arise from the overlapping properties of parts of
speech, since in this language not only verbs, but also nouns, prepositions,
and others may occur as predicates. These ambiguities center on the
absolutive form, which is a form of a potentially predicative word which is
marked neither as being subordinated or nominal, nor as having a specific
illocutionary, evidential, or modal force. Like other predicative forms,
these enter into a paradigm of suffixes indicating person and number of
their subject, but non-third-person forms are infrequent (and do not occur
in our central sample) and the third person is also unmarked. Thus in