What to do to ‘do-to . . .’: Notes on an Object Marker in Nuu-chah-nulth

Abstract

AbstractThe syntactic behaviour of the object marker?uukwiłin Nuu-chah-nulth is documented based on fieldwork data that illustrate patterns not previously discussed in the literature. A Minimalist-type analysis is presented, in which?uukwiłis a light verb of the categoryvand is generated in the complement position of the main verb. This captures certain traits of?uukwiłthat have hitherto not been unified under a single analysis: its morphological and syntactic autonomy, its semantic dependence on another predicate for argument structure, its link to discourse saliency, and its use as an auxiliary item in A′-raising constructions.