The Verbal Morphology of Santiam Kalapuya

Abstract

This work is a detailed description of the verbal morphology of Santiam Kalapuya, an extinct Native American language of Oregon. This work is the first in-depth grammatical analysis of this language. The data used for this study are texts with translation which were transcribed by Melville Jacobs in the 1930’s from Mr. John B. Hudson, one of the last speakers. The analysis presented here focuses on the verbal morphosyntax of Santiam, including the placement, form, and function of prefixes and suffixes on the verb stem. Eleven prefix positions and six suffix positions have been identified, with a total of twenty-one prefixes and fifteen suffixes. These affixes code a wide range of grammatical features, as, for example, tense, aspect, modality, grammatical relation, subordination, and direction. A brief overview of common phonological processes and nonverbal morphology is also given.