Theme-Attraction and Bound Verbs in Southern Wakashan

Abstract

The present article addresses the issue of the existence of noun incorporation in the Southern Wakashan languages of the Pacific Northwest. There have been a number of proposals for treating a process in the languages that combines elements of a theme argument with a bound verbal element. None of these previous treatments account for the full range of data surrounding this phenomenon in this family of languages. This article introduces new data from all of the Southern Wakashan languages, demonstrating that this is a property of the entire family and provides a new analysis of this phenomenon that makes use of a feature of theme attraction that may be associated with select verbal elements in all three languages. This feature, combined with a distinction between verbal suffix and bound verb, suggests a new and more general account of the facts of the process. When combined with the recognition of the thematic parallelism between transitive objects and unaccusative subjects, this leads to a new and general account of the facts of the process of combining elements of the theme argument with bound verbs in Southern Wakashan languages.