172 Michael Fortescue
which the second predicate shares any clausal mood marking of the preced-
ing one. Nakayama prefers not to use the term ‘finite’, since it smacks of
morphosyntactic finiteness of form (pers. comm.). He describes it as “mak-
ing the event feel more immediate and punctuated” and points out that it
plays an important role in discourse organization. Mithun glosses it as
‘momentaneous’, and Swadesh as ‘now, at that time’. In general, I have
used Nakayama’s glosses in the examples. Jacobsen’s characterization of
the affix’s principal function seems to me convincing, as distinguishing
clausal from nuclear cosubordination in the case of ambiguous ‘absolutive’
(uninflected) forms of predicates with no marking of illocutionary mood (or
subordination or modality) following initial predicates that may well show
such marking. Note that the CONDIT(IONAL) mood is used here to mark
habitual action.- But Focus in the sense of non-contrastive ‘newsworthiness’, as in the sen-
tences above, can also be assigned to (at least) object terms, in which case
they can be put in initial position, without these special relational predi-
cates, as in:
i. c’aak t’a:ps-at-a-qu:
river dive-sinking.into(water)-TEL-3.COND.INFER
‘He would dive into the river every once in a while’
A similar distinction between contrastive stress and merely ‘most newswor-
thy’ emphasis on a given entity referred to can be observed in most
languages. In English, for example, one would use respectively either a cleft
construction (or simply strong stress on a constituent) and (other) prosodic
means of emphasis. In Danish Sign Language the former is also expressed
either by emphasis (an emphatic production of a sign) or by something like
a cleft construction, as opposed to raised eyebrows marking a referent (or
any other segment of an utterance) as the most newsworthy part (Engberg-
Pedersen 1991: 64).
- Despite the general polysynthetic character of this language, Nootka word-
forms can only accommodate a single verbal stem, typically marking no
more than one participant, so that transitive clauses are often split up into
two parts, one indicating the subject’s action, another involving the preposi-
tion-like transitive focusing predicate ‘do with respect to’ mentioned above
to indicate the object. The study of cross-linguistic variation in the density
of packaging of information in single clause units is still in its infancy (al-
though it is being broached in various ways, e.g. in terms of alternative
event structure construals – by cognitive linguists like Langacker – and of
the distinction between ‘verb and satellite framed’ languages – by psycho-
linguists like Slobin – and in terms of cosubordinate clause chaining within
Role and Reference Grammar). Some languages containing ‘serial verb’