Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

CLAUSE COMBINING IN NOOTKA^261

Another type of interaction may conceivably involve the sentence-con­
nectives. I have claimed (section 7) that when in absolutive form these are
cosubordinated to the preceding clause. But they do not occur without a
following clause, and in this sense are weakly dependent on it, much like
traditional English sentence adverbials (moreover, nevertheless). Whether
or not this constitutes subordination, the fact remains that this distribu­
tional dependency involves a relationship to what follows, whereas the
operator projection involved in cosubordination is related to what pre­
cedes.

13.4 Directionality of clause chaining

It was noted above (section 3) that Nootka displays a mirror-image
relationship in the directionality of its operator projection as compared with
the better-known instances of clause chaining from verb-final languages.
The latter type, where the categories are projected backwards from the
final verb of the sequence, may be called regressive clause chaining, and the
type seen in Nootka (and Swahili), where the categories are projected for­
ward from the beginning of the sequence, progressive clause chaining.
There are indications that these opposed directionalities may tend to corre­
late with the typical position of the verb in the sentence, and also (espe­
cially for verb-medial languages) with the embodiment of the shared
categories as suffixes vs. prefixes.
The other Nootkan languages, Nitinat and Makah, show an entirely
analogous use of the absolutive in progressive clause chaining.^24 Another
language that is strikingly similar typologically to Nootka is (Hokan) Yana
of north central California; all of the specifications of section 0 fit this lan­
guage also. In Northern Yana a sequence of past tense and quotati ve suf­
fixes is regularly used on verbs in mythological narrative. This is used also
in Central Yana, but here it is often replaced after first occurrences by an
infinitive form in a use referred to by Sapir (1923:268, η. 11) as narrative
absolutive.^25 In Yahi (southernmost Yana) on the other hand, only the
infinitive is used in narrative, the quotative suffix being reserved for mark­
ing direct discourse (cf. Sapir 1923, especially η. Ι, 11, 103, 182).
Kiparsky (1968:36) noted a similarity of the Vedic injunctive to the
Biblical Hebrew "waw-consecutive" construction, wherein the first verb of
a sequence is in the perfective form, and the following verbs are imperfec-
tive, connected by the conjunction w—- thus in effect neutralizing the indi-