The SENĆOŦEN Resultive Construction

Abstract

The resultive and actual (imperfective) aspects in SENĆOŦEN (Saanich), a dialect of North Straits Salish, have been previously considered to contain two separate actual and resultive morphemes (Montler 1986). In contrast, it is argued here that the SENĆOŦEN resultive construction is a complex construction, built on an actual base by prefixation of stative [s-]. Both morphophonological evidence and morphosyntactic evidence for this claim are considered: resultives and actuals exhibit the same non-concatenative allomorphy, and they appear to be in complementary distribution with respect to argument structure. This paper also considers the semantic aspectual properties of resultives, and suggests that the morphologically complex resultive is semantically compositional: it contains a [durative] feature contributed by the actual morpheme and a [static] feature contributed by the stative prefix.