Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

CLAUSE COMBINING IN NOOTKA^247

The evidence is also strong that these sentence-connectives do not charac­
teristically form part of the following clause. The following verb is often
marked with -'αλ Finite, the subject occasionally intervenes, and the follow­
ing verb may have its own first person absolutive ending -sr:

(138:19)

then-lsG buy-lsG slave next year-MOM-FiN-REL-3

"then I bought a slave the next year".

Although these sentence-connectives are weakly dependent on the fol­

lowing clauses, in the sense that they do not occur without one, they are not

embedded in them, so that we have an asymmetrical case of a core cosubor-

dinated to a (preceding) clause, with the following clause also usually being

cosubordinate. The sentence-connectives that are marked as quotative or

indicative, on the other hand, enter into a symmetrical relationship of

clausal cosubordination with the following clause.

8. Prepositional clauses

Prepositions in Nootka are a subclass of transitive verb, formed on the ref­

erential stem , and they can act as predicates of independent clauses.

Therefore it has been noted that combinations of them with their objects

are appropriately called prepositional clauses (Jacobsen 1979a:128, Rose &

Carlson 1984:2, Whistler 1985:229). In absolutive form these may combine

with main clauses so as to introduce an additional argument. This seems to

be a clear case of core cosubordination. The prepositions must have sub­

jects coreferential with those of the main clauses, and they are not other­

wise inflected except for passive. There is a unitary relationship between

the prepositions and their following objects, but the lexical content of the

preposition specifies the role this object plays in the larger clause. These

prepositions either serve to focus (or merely disambiguate) an argument

that would be allowable given the valence of the predicate, or they allow

the introduction of additional peripheral arguments.

(four occurrences in narrative and one, in the distorted form

in a song) indicates a direct object:

(30:5-6)

die-MOM-CAUs-FiN-3 Kwatyat OBJ Wolf

"Kwatyat killed Wolf".