Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

CLAUSE COMBINING IN NOOTKA 259

the functions of the injunctive were taken over by the historical present in
other early branches of Indo-European, such as Greek and Old Irish, in
which case the present and the indicative are respectively the unmarked
tense and mood. Kiparsky interprets the properties of the conjoined injunc­
tive as instances of conjunction reduction in a broad sense (including gap­
ping), whereby the repetition of the exponents of tense and mood are
deleted. Since he thought of the process of conjunction reduction as apply­
ing to constituents, rather than features (or operators), he concluded that
tense and mood would have been deep structure adverbial constituents in
early Indo-European. Foley and Van Valin, on the other hand, would pre­
sumably regard this as an instance of cosubordination, whereby the clausal
operators of tense and mood apply also to the following verb form, a case
of operator (not constituent) dependency. Now, whether one thinks of
deletion or of projection of categories onto another form depends, in large
part, on the analytical model that one brings to bear, and is thus not a
straightforward empirical question. Certainly conjunction reduction, if
thought of as a historical process, would have played a part in the origin of
these cosubordinating verb forms, much as in the origin of certain Papuan
patterns of switch-reference marking (Haiman 1983:106-114). But syn-
chronically deletion, while plausibly applying to cases like the Indo-Euro­
pean augment or the Lenakel tense-markers, seems much less appropriate
when there is an affirmative marker of the category, as in the Swahili /cá­
tense or the Nootka non-third-person absolutive forms.

13.3 Relationships among nexus types

The concept of cosubordination was introduced by Olson (1981) in his

study of clause junctures in (Papuan) Barai. In Foley & Van Valin

(1984:256-261) examples of clausal cosubordination are presented from lan­

guages with typical anticipatory switch-reference, Kewa and Tonkawa, with

mention also of Barai, Washo, and Chickasaw, along with examples from

English and German that would conventionally be regarded as exhibiting

deletion of a shared subject by conjunction reduction. Van Valin (1984:543-

550) also gives examples from switch-reference languages, Chuave and

Fore, and again Kewa and Tonkawa, but more suggestive for our purposes

are examples from two languages lacking switch-reference, and where no

overt deletion occurs and there are no conjunctions: (Bantu) Swahili, with

its ka- "consecutive marker" replacing an explicit tense morpheme, which is