Abstract
AbstractLike many other Salish languages, in Halkomelem Salish, with transitive verbs, it is not possible to combine a 3rd person with a 2nd person. We propose that this *3/2 constraint is morphological in nature. This departs from previous analyses which have taken the *3/2 constraint to be the effect of a hierarchy of [person] and/or [animate] features. One consequence of analysing the *3/2 constraint as morphologically based is that person/animacy hierarchies are not primitives in the grammar. In particular, we show that person-based gaps in transitive verb paradigms receive a morpho-syntactic explanation, and that apparent restrictions on the distribution of the [animate] feature actually reflect the lexical semantics of the predicate.
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