The Salish Language Family: Reconstructing Syntax (review)

This book is probably unique among studies of North American Indian languages in its accomplishments, and it is an important work for anyone interested in comparative syntax, those interested in the syntax of American Indian languages, and, above all, anyone studying Salish or other Northwest languages. The subtitle is crucial to knowing what to expect in general although it promises more than is actually presented (not surprisingly, given the huge array of possible syntactic issues in any language); what Kroeber actually does is compare a limited number of syntactic features of Salish languages, suggest reconstructions of them, and explain how they must have developed in various parts of the family. All this was no mean feat; Salish is one of the largest language families in North America (with 23 languages), and availability of pertinent data is very uneven. To make his job harder, K chose some of the most complex types of constructions that languages have to offer: complement and adverbial clauses, relative clauses, and extraction.

The volume begins with prefatory remarks on the sources he uses and how he has normalized transcriptions, essential lists of abbreviations, and a map showing the location of Salish and neighboring languages. Ch. 1 (1–78) provides a background for the rest of the book: the phonological inventory of Proto-Salish and many of its pertinent developments into modern Salish languages, then quick overviews of morphological and clausal structures that are necessary for an understanding of the body of the volume. Chs. 2 and 3 (79–251) look at complement and adverbial clauses; Chs. 4–6 (252–363) examine relative clauses, Ch. 7 (364–411) looks briefly at various fronting constructions, and Ch. 8 (412–32) speculates on possible influences from neighboring non-Salish languages. Other major syntactic issues are not treated at all, not bearing significantly on his major themes; thus there is nothing about compounding, lexical suffixes, causatives, or applicatives, all of which were found in Proto-Salish and have important syntactic ramifications in all modern languages of the family.

Very briefly, K’s findings are the following: (1) ‘Proto-Salish must have had a conjunctive inflectional paradigm of some sort’ (246), and this conjunctive ‘presumably marked conditional clauses’ (246), although how many varieties of conditional and adverbial clauses is indeterminate. (2) ‘Propositional nominalization can be assumed to have been used in most complement clauses other than interrogative ones’ (249). (3) ‘Relativization of subjects and objects presumably was marked not by any special overt inflection distinct from that of main clauses, but (if at all) merely by omission of subject or object pronominal morphology from the predicate complex’ (307). He finds it difficult to be sure how relativized objects or possessors were treated; ‘subject-centered clauses followed the present-day Bella Coola pattern’ (307); relativized oblique objects used nominalization by means of a prefixed /s-/.

The reader who pays close attention may observe a bias toward some Salish languages and a neglect of others. This was inevitable, given the availability of data. Just over 49% of K’s examples are from the Interior branch of Salish, 28% from the three northern languages of this branch alone. Forty percent are from the Central Salish branch; Tillamook and Bella Coola, isolates within the family, are adequately represented. However, the Tsamosan branch, comprising four languages, is represented by Upper Chehalis alone, and only 2.5% of the examples come from that language. The reasons for this imbalance are simple: K himself worked on these very issues in his Thompson fieldwork but largely on other matters when he earlier worked on Sliammon (Central Salish). Other syntacticians have worked on the other two Northern Interior languages, on Okanagan (Southern Interior), and on Halkomelem (Central Salish) and on Bella Coola.

K carefully went through the manuscript texts in Tillamook that had been collected by Franz Boas in 1890 and May Edel in 1931. I am greatly impressed with what...