Functional Forms-Formal Functions: An Account of Coeur d'Alene Clause Structure

Abstract

Coeur d'Alene, also known as Snchitsu'umshtsn, is a Southern Interior Salishan language no longer learned by children. Descriptive work on the language has been carried out since the early nineteenth-century (Tiet 1904 through 1909 in Boaz and Tiet 1930; Reichard 1927-29, 1938, 1939; Doak 1997); however, a formal account of the basic clause structure of this polysynthetic language has until now not been proposed. This thesis presents such a formal analysis within the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 1998, 2000, 2001a, 2001b; Lasnik 1999a, 1999b, 2000; among others), employing the tenets of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993; Harley and Noyer 1999; among others). Demonstrating that an analysis of person marking morphemes as bound pronouns (Jelinek 1984) is more "economical" in terms of Chomsky's (1995:367)Elementary Principles of Economy, the thesis goes on to account for the phenomena of lexical affixation (Carlson 1990; Kinkade 1998; Gerdts 2003; among others), in Coeur d'Alene as incorporation. Appealing to Hale and Keyser's (2002) theory of conflation as Head-movement (Harley 2004), an approach to incorporation is proposed which captures Chomsky's (1995) claim that head-movement is phonological while at the same time illustrating that lexical affixes in Coeur d'Alene serve as incorporated arguments. The thesis concludes with an articulation of the left periphery (material above vP here), based on the strict ordering of a series of mood, adverbial, model, and aspectual particles. It is shown that this articulation in Coeur d'Alene patterns with Cinque's (1999) proposed universal hierarchy of functional and adverbial heads. In this way, the basic clause structure of Coeur d'Alene is formally presented