Donna B. Gerdts – författare

This book treats aspects of the syntax of Halkomelem, a Salish language spoken in southwestern British Columbia, specifically those constructions which involve objects, and seeks to accomplish two goals. First, it provides natural language fodder for the debate concerning the nature of grammatical relations and their place in syntactic theory. Second, by showing that Halkomelem draws from a familiar class of universal constructions and organizes its syntax around some simple and common parameters, the author has brought the Salish languages, which due to their phonological and morphological complexity seemed particularly fearsome, into cross-linguistic perspective.

American linguistics has a tradition of finding unique and important insights from studies of Native American languages, often leading to innovations in current theories. At the same time, research on Native languages has been enhanced by the perspectives of modern theory. This book extends this tradition by presenting original analyses of aspects of six Native languages of Canada-Algonquin, Athapaskan, Eskimo, Iroquoian, Salishan, and Siouan.Addressing problems relevant to phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, the authors make both descriptive and theoretical contributions by presenting data that has not been previously published or treated from the viewpoint of contemporary theory.