Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

258 WILLIAM H. JACOBSEN, JR.

conjunction reduction, relationships among nexus types, directionality of

clause chaining, and generalized clause chaining.

13.1 Frequency of subordination

Making my best judgements about clause boundaries (and counting only

clauses), I find the proportion of subordinate clauses (to the total of inde­

pendent, absolutive, and subordinate clauses) to be 13.5% in the narrative

passages of our sample and 9.2% in the direct quotes. These figures are a

little higher than the lows of 2% to 7% reported by Mithun (section 1), but

still much less than the 28% for Tlingit and the 34% to 46% for English.

This is striking, given the full development of Nootka devices for explicit

subordination, which obviate the need for some of the indirect approaches

outlined by Mithun (1984:497-505). The factor of polysynthesis that she

adduced applies here also, of course. But probably also relevant is the

occurrence of cosubordination, given that 57.4% of the clauses in the narra­

tive text are absolutive. These cosubordinated clauses doubtless relieve the

pressure to avoid repeating all the clausal operators of combined clauses

that leads to more frequent subordination in other languages.^19 Jeffers

(1976) considers Old Irish, Ancient Egyptian, Squamish, and Tahitian, and

concludes that VSO languages will be sparse in non-finite verbal forms

(participles, gerunds, infinitives) and will favor embedding by nominaliza-

tion. This fits Nootka fairly well: the absolutive and subordinate forms are

finite in that they inflect for subject, and otherwise subordination is by core

nominalization.^20

13.2 Cosubordination vs. conjunction reduction

In an important paper, Kiparsky (1968) discussed the early Indo-European

injunctive verb forms, which are best attested in Vedic Sanskrit. These are

forms with "secondary" endings but lacking the augment (a prefix *e-)

elsewhere associated with them. Kiparsky shows that these forms, like the

Nootka absolutive, neutralize the verbal categories of tense and mood,

expressing only person, number, and voice. They occur commonly con­

joined to non-injunctive forms, whose tense and mood they are understood

as also expressing. Their other main types of occurrence are with the pro­

hibitive adverb ma, and also — again like the Nootka absolutive — uncon-

joined in ritual and mythological passages. Kiparsky also demonstrates that