Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

494 MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN

Chinookan Ascribed Habitual Relative Clauses (Coreferent NPs):

Deverbative nominalizations

Figure 13

Now, from the point of view of cross-clause linkage relations, it turns

out that the antipassive, as we might expect, plays the major role above a

certain tightness of linkage. Most of the clause linkage relations in

Chinookan are handled by simple sequencing of clauses plus deletion of

noun phrases for coreference (recall the inflectional pronominals always

remain on the constituents that govern the nouns). But for relative clauses

expressing ascribed habitual action (one who is supposed to/by nature can/

whose duty or role it is to do something or be some way), the language

shows nonfinite, nominalized normal forms, where transitive predicates

occur in antipassivized nominative/absolutive : dative construction, with the

dative pronominal position (i.e., the adnominal dative or genitive, which

globally alternates with ergative) being coreferent with the head of the

noun phrase and coding the "A" and "S" underlying case-relations, or

other case-relation derivatively regimented into this form, as in Figure 13.

Other case-relations are not handled with this construction, but rather with

a regular finite clause. So there is not only severe constraint on the linkage

tightness in Chinookan antipassivization, but there is the characteristic

restriction of what case-relations are available for coreference marking,

here "A" and "S".

4. The "focality" of nom/abs : dat

We have been pointing out the details of both clause-level and discourse-

level morphosyntactic facts of these two languages from the perspective of

a unified typological account, summarized in Figure 14. We can compare

the placement of the nominative/absolutive : dative case-marking schema

within the systems of inflection of these two languages now with a better

sense of the similarities and differences. In Djirbal, the normal form of