3 Responses to “Nominal and Verbal Conjunction”

1. Henry Davis Says:
   November 19th, 2011 at 9:49 am

   You cite Lillooet (Salish) as exemplifying a ‘differentiated’ system. But Lillooet uses its general purpose conjunction múta7 for coordination of all constituents, including clauses and DPs. It also uses its clefti marker nilh to connect sequences of clauses, but nilh is not really a conjunction, but a subordinating predicate. On your criteria, I’d therfore say that Lilllooet uses an ‘identical’ strategy.

   Henry Davis

2. Martin Haspelmath Says:
   December 1st, 2011 at 5:18 pm

   Thanks for this comment. In van Eijk’s grammar, múta’ is described as combining NPs, but not as combining clauses (only nilh is mentioned for the latter function).

3. Henry Davis Says:
   December 4th, 2011 at 9:35 am

   Here’s a textual example of clausal coordination with múta7 in St’át’imcets/Lillooet from Lisa Matthewson’s 2005 volume of personal histories of St’át’imc elders: (the example is in the van Eijk practical orthography in common use in Lillooet territory):

   [xzum ti=q’úmqen-s=a] múta7 [xzum ti=tsútsin-s-a]
   [big det=head-3poss=exis] and [big det=head-3poss=exis]
   “It’s head was big and it’s mouth was big.”

   The reason why múta7 is less common as a clausal conjunction than as a phrasal conjunction is because unlike English ‘and’ it never encodes temporal sequencing, so it is limited to cases like the one above where there is no temporal ordering between clauses.

   Henry Davis

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