Download or read book Object and Absolutive in Halkomelem Salish (RLE Linguistics F: World Linguistics) written by Donna B. Gerdts and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book treats aspects of the syntax of Halkomelem, a Salish language spoken in southwestern British Columbia, specifically those constructions which involve objects, and seeks to accomplish two goals. First, it provides natural language fodder for the debate concerning the nature of grammatical relations and their place in syntactic theory. Second, by showing that Halkomelem draws from a familiar class of universal constructions and organizes its syntax around some simple and common parameters, the author has brought the Salish languages, which due to their phonological and morphological complexity seemed particularly fearsome, into cross-linguistic perspective.