Grammatical Relations in Southern Wakashan Locative Affixation

Southern Wakashan languages (Makah, Nuuchahnulth, Ditidaht) commonly express location concepts with so-called “restrictive” locative suffixes attached to nouns, verbs, and other kinds of morphological bases. This paper examines the syntax of clauses with a restrictive locative suffix as the sole clausal predicator. Four construction types are identified, distinguished by four possible combinations of morphological base and linking pattern of suffixal arguments (Figure and Ground) to grammatical functions. The flexibility of subject linking is argued to follow from the regular transitive linking rules with the crucial difference that, unlike two-place verbs, restrictive locative suffixes do not lexically differentiate their arguments by agency. The variation in morphological base type is shown to be sensitive to the information status of the Figure.