Lushootseed grammar is the grammar of the Lushootseed language, a Central Coast Salish language of the Salishan language family.
Lushootseed can be considered a relatively agglutinating language, given its high number of morphemes, including a large number of lexical suffixes. Word order is fairly flexible, although it is generally considered to be verb-subject-object (VSO).[1]
Lushootseed is capable of creating grammatically correct sentences that contain only a verb, with no subject or object. All information beyond the action is to be understood by context. This can be demonstrated in ʔuʔəy’dub '[someone] managed to find [someone/something]'.[2] Sentences which contain no verb at all are also common, as Lushootseed has no copula. An example of such a sentence is stab əw̓ə tiʔiɫ 'What [is] that?'.[3]
Despite its general status as VSO, Lushootseed can be rearranged to be subject-verb-object (SVO) and verb-object-subject (VOS). Doing so does not modify the words themselves, but may require the particle ʔə to mark the change. The exact nature of this particle is the subject of some debate.
The main reason for the change of word order in Lushootseed is the fact that a subject pronoun must come second in a sentence. Normally, in VSO word order, the subject comes second. However, if a zero copula is used, the word order is changed to object-subject to preserve the subject-pronoun-second rule. A similar scenario occurs with the negator xʷiʔ.
dxʷləbiʔ '''čəxʷ''' ʔu 'Are you Lummi?'Here, negation takes the first position, the subject pronoun takes the second, and 'Lummi' is pushed to the end of the sentence.'I am not Lummi.'
Prepositions in Lushootseed are almost entirely handled by one word, ʔal, which can mean 'on, above, in, beside, around' among a number of potential other meanings. They come before the object they reference, much like in English. Examples of this can be found in the following sentences:
Determiners usually come before a noun they belong to, and have two possible genders "masculine" (the default) and "feminine". However, in a sentence reordered to become SVO, such as sqʷəbayʔ ti ʔučalatəb ʔə tiʔiɬ wiw'su 'The dog is what the children chased' the determiner for sqʷəbayʔ 'dog' comes after the noun, instead of before it.
Gender distinction in Lushootseed primarily manifests in the addition of a feminine infix -s- within the determiner, following immediately after the first sound of the word. For example, tiʔiɬ 'that' becomes tsiʔiɬ 'that (feminine)'. The sequence [ts] is not spelled with c in these contexts.
| tə | tsə | 'the', 'a' | A generic demonstrative. Sometimes pronounced ta/tsa | |
| ti | tsi | 'the' | For nouns that have only one possible reference, such as names[6] | |
| kʷi | kʷsi | 'a/an', 'some' | Generic or hypothetical | |
| tiʔəʔ | tsiʔəʔ | 'this' | Proximal | |
| tiʔiɬ | tsiʔiɬ | 'that' | Distal |
| tə | tsə | 'the', 'a' | A generic demonstrative. Sometimes pronounced ta/tsa | |
| šə | sə | 'the' | For nouns that have only one possible reference, such as names | |
| kʷi | kʷsi | 'a/an', 'some' | Generic or hypothetical | |
| ti | tsi | 'this' | Proximal | |
| tiiɬ | tsiiɬ | 'that' | Distal |
Lushootseed has four subject pronouns: čəd 'I' (first-person singular), čəɬ 'we' (first-person plural), čəxʷ 'you' (second-person singular), and čələp 'you' (second-person plural).
| Singular | čəd | čəxʷ | ∅ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plural | čəɬ | čələp | (h)əlgʷəʔ |
Almost all instances of a verb in Lushootseed (excluding the zero copula) carry a prefix indicating their tense and/or aspect. Below is a (non-exhaustive) list of these prefixes, along with their meanings and applications.
| Prefix | Usage | |
|---|---|---|
| ʔəs- | Imperfective present (non-motion verbs) | |
| lə- | Imperfective present (motion verbs) | |
| ʔu- | Completed telic actions | |
| tu- | Past | |
| ɬu- | Future | |
| ƛ̕u- | Habitual | |
| gʷ(ə)- | Subjunctive/future |
'I am feeling fine.' or 'I am in good health.'If a verb does involve motion, the ʔəs- prefix is replaced with lə-:
'I'm going home.'Completed or telic actions use the prefix ʔu-. Most verbs without ʔəs- or lə- will use ʔu-. Some verbs also exhibit a contrast in meaning between lə- and ʔu-, and only one of them is correct:
'You jump(ed).'The verb saxʷəb literally means 'to jump, leap, or run, especially in a short burst of energy', and is correctly used with ʔu-. In contrast, the verb təlawil, which means 'to jump or run for an extended period of time', is used with lə-:
'You are jumping.'
Negation in Lushootseed takes the form of an adverb xʷiʔ 'no, none, nothing' which always comes at the beginning of the sentence that is to be negated. It is constructed in two possible ways, one for negatives of existence, and one for negatives of identity. If taking the form of a negative of identity, a proclitic lə- must be added to the sentence on the next adverb. If there are no further adverbs in the sentence, the proclitic attaches to the head word of the predicate, as in the sentence xʷiʔ čəxʷ sixʷ ləbakʷɬ 'Don't get hurt again'.
There are five possessive affixes, derived from the pronouns:
| Singular | d- | ad- | -s | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plural | -čəɬ | -ləp | (none) |
Lushootseed has a wide variety of miscellaneous derivational affixes. Most of them apply to nouns to change their exact meaning, but several can change nouns to verbs or vice versa.