Process and pattern interpretations 159There is another kind of lexical suffix in Nootka than the illustrated
‘governing’ type, namely the ‘restrictive’ type as in (18), which has no par-
allel in West Greenlandic. There are a great many suffixes of this type for
expressing location and instrument, etc., in Nootka, as in most of the lan-
guages of the surrounding Northwest American linguistic area:
(18) quac-’aq
person-inside
‘There is a person inside’
Here the topic is person (tracked as such in following discourse), as op-
posed to canoe in (15) for example. The verbal/nominal/adverbial status of
the suffix is lexically quite indeterminate – it is only in the context of a
predication, such as this sentence, that it is clear that its function is to mod-
ify (for location) the left-most constituent understood as a zero-verbalized
nominal, i.e. in an existential context. It only differs from other predicates
in being an obligatorily bound form.
This leads us back to the question of the status of nominal versus verbal
expressions in Nootka in general, for as Nakayama puts it, although it is
not easy to differentiate between isolated verbs and nouns, it is generally
clear what element is functioning as a verbal or a nominal, either because a
verbal morpheme functioning as a nominal or a nominal one functioning as
a (sentence) predicate is marked as such by affixation or because the dis-
course context renders it apparent (when, for instance, serialization is
involved). In the following sentences (from Swadesh 1936, phonemicized
according to Nakayama) the verbal affix on the first word and the nominal
one on the second make this quite clear, whichever of them is chosen as
sentence predicate:^12
(19) mamu:k-ma qu:as-i
work-INDIC man-DEF
‘The man is working’
(20) qu:as-ma mamu:k-i
man-INDIC work-DEF
‘The working one is a man’
The situation is somewhat obscured by the fact that sentential affixes
(inflections) are not obligatory, unlike, say, the inflections of West
Greenlandic. Nevertheless, a lexical item referring to an entity (a proto-
typical ‘nominal’) cannot function as a verb except in copular sentences of