Three Ways of Looking at a Salish Clitic
Henry Davis, University of British Columbia
presenting joint work with Marianne Huijsmans of the University of Alberta
Salish languages are known for their extensive inventory of clause-level clitics, including force markers, subject agreement, modals, tense, and discourse particles. In the Central and Northern Interior branches of the family these form a clitic string following the first predicative element in the clause: this has led them to be classified as second position (2P) clitics. Just like their better-studied Slavic counterparts, 2P clitics in Salish have been analyzed syntactically (Jelinek 1996), phonologically (Gerdts and Werle 2014) and via a combination of both (Huijsmans 2015). In this talk I show that none of these approaches is adequate to deal with 2PCs in the Northern Interior language St’át’imcets or the Central Salish language ʔayʔaǰuθəm. Instead, I argue that clitic placement must be morphologically determined. More specifically, I develop a model where clitic linearization takes place at a post-syntactic, pre-phonological level within a two-step model of lexical insertion.
