Origin of Lexical Suffixes in the Salish Languages

Abstract

Lexical suffixation is an essential feature of the Salish language family. Such suffixes form closed classes of morphemes that express various types of meaning, e.g., somatisms, locatives, natural phenomena, artefacts, phytonyms, etc. Most Salish lexical suffixes are of substantive nature. However, they hardly ever correspond with free forms of substantives, be it synchronically or diachronically. The authors reviewed a number of theories concerning the origin and development of the Salish lexical suffixes. Based on the synchronic and diachronic analysis, they put forward the following hypothesis of the origin of the Salish lexical suffixes. The suffixes stared as a dependent predicative construction, eventually compressed into a morphologically-coherent model according to the following evolution scheme: dependent predication / nominalized predicate → compounding / incorporation → lexical suffix (bound morpheme). Thus, the synchronous Salish substantives are diachronically based on verbal stems with their process semantics. The study adds to the linguistic understanding of the origin of various parts of speech and the borders between substantives and verbs.