Philip W. Davis

Bella Coola Nominal Deixis.

The principal nominal deictic affixes of Bella Coola, a Salishan language of British Columbia, are examined. Semantically, a three-way distinction is found: Proximal, Middle, and Distal for deictic space; Present, Near Past, and Distant Past for deictic time. The notion of neighborhood and a definition of natural and unnatural circumstance are introduced to explain the usage of the affixes and the observed neutralization of the semantic components of space and time.*

Absence of Noun Marking in Alabama

I Alabama is a Muskogean language of the Eastern Branch. It is spoken by a number of residents of the Alabama-Coushatta reservation some fifteen miles east of Livingston, Texas. We wish to express here our appreciation to Ms. Cora Sylestine and Ms. Wanda Poncho for sharing their language with us and for their patience in enduring our questions about it. The work reported in this paper, originally presented to the XXIVth Conference on American Indian Languages, has been supported by the Department of Linguistics and Semiotics, Rice University and by a Faculty Research Grant from North Texas State University. Finally, we wish to express our thanks to the reviewers for their comments on the paper; all deficiencies remain ours. We shall use abbreviations as follows: Asp = Aspect; Aug = Augmentative; Aux = Auxiliary; Caus = Causative; Decl = Declarative; Dim = Diminutive; DO = Direct Object; DP = Distant Past; Evid = Evidential; For = Foreign; Fut = Future; IndPro = Indefinite Pronoun; Inst = Instrument; Neg = Negative; Nom = Nominative; Obj = Object; Obl = Oblique; P1 = Plural; Prox = Proximal; Q = Question; Refl = Reflexive; Recip = Reciprocal; Sem = Semifactitive; Sg = Singular; Subj = Subject; Subjn = Subjunctive; Top = Topic. The symbols used in transcribing Alabama are those used in an orthography created by Heather K. Hardy and Cora Sylestine (ms.) for use by the speakers of the language, and with the exception of orthographic ch to represent /c/, they take their normal phonetic values.

The Semantics of Agreement in Alabama

Les As. discutent des donnees sur les marqueurs pronominaux en alabama (langue muskogee) et veulent montrer que le choix du marqueur pronominal exprime la semantique de la relation entre les participants et les evenements. Ils offrent une analyse alternative des marqueurs pronominaux en alabama basee sur la semantique du controle, au sens de Klaiman

Bella Coola Head Bone Nomenclature

The toponymy of head bones in Bella Coola is described and compared with the corresponding English scientific system. The differences between the two systems reflect the different evolutionary stages to which each system belongs. The Bella Coola system remains in a topographical stage, while the English scientific system has passed through this stage to a morphological one. In addition, the following points are made: (1) Bella Coola has a system of head bone names, not merely a random array of head bone names; (2) that a system exists is shown by evidence of a nonlinguistic or linguistically neutral nature, namely the results of the part-whole test; (3) that a system exists is also manifest in the linguistic data that constitute the nomenclature; (4) that the systems of (2) and (3) are, with one exception, identical.

Control and Development in Bella Coola

attached to the element within the sentence that conveys information of some EVENT.1 Rather than further specifying the EVENT itself, in the manner, say, of aspectual marking, these suffixes encode information concerning the PARTICIPANTS. The members of this affixal set are displayed in table 1. Visual inspection immediately suggests the hypothesis that they themselves are morphologically complex, and our discussion proceeds along the lines of determining the degree to which this initial impression is valid. In doing this, we shall include some elaboration on the syntax and semantics of the recurrent partials by way of justifying that segmentation. Let us begin by considering the following forms: (la) nuyamf-tnm-c sing-I (lb) *nuyamf-atnm-c (2a) Xs-tnm-c fat-I