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Verb classes in Kwaḱwala

University of British Columbia

This thesis examines the aspectual system of Kwaḱwala, a Northern Wakashan language of British Columbia. I explore both the lexical and grammatical aspect system, and the interaction between the two systems. Instead of the traditional Vendlerian verb classes of states, activities, accomplishments and achievements, I propose that Kwaḱwala employs just three verb classes: states, processes and transitions. With regard to the grammatical aspect system, this thesis focuses on the description and analysis of the aspect suffix -x'id. I propose that this suffix is a perfective suffix which asserts only that an initial transition into an event has occurred within reference time. The thesis also offers a brief description of the contemporary Kwaḱwala tense system as well as the continuous aspect suffix, -ala.

Text

2013-10-01

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/45178

Linguistics

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/