Juggling arguments: VSVO and other word orders in Hul’q’umi’num’ Salish SVCs

. This paper investigates the word order of serial-verb constructions in Hul’q’umi’num’ Salish. Hul’q’umi’num’ SVCs are monoclausal constructions consisting of two(+) verbs that can function as independent lexical verbs, have matching aspect, share one(+) argument, and are not connected by any linking element. Two-verb SVCs may consist of transitive and intransitive verbs. The first question concerns subject and object NP placement. For constructions with two overt NPs, an alternating VSVO pattern is both preferred in elicitation, and the only order occurring in the corpus. Only shared arguments may intervene between the verb components. Hul’q’umi’num’ SVCs exhibit flexible word order in elicitation, but certain grammatical word orders generate ambiguity. Various pragmatic strategies work together to prevent or rescue ambiguous constructions. SVCs are an understudied feature of Central Salish languages; thus investigation of this topic broadens the scope of the current literature.

1.1.SINGLE VERB CLAUSES.An important research question to be addressed here concerns argument placement: where are subject and object NPs permitted to occur in SVCs?The discussion of this question will begin with the patterns found in clauses with a single verb.Salish clauses minimally consist of a predicate, which may be verbal (4), nominal, or adjectival (see Gerdts & Schneider in press).
1.2.SERIAL VERB CONSTRUCTIONS.While Hul'q'umi'num' exhibits several types of multi-verb constructions (cf.Schneider 2021), serial verbs are the focus of this paper.Hul'q'umi'num' SVCs are monoclausal constructions consisting of two or more verbs that can function as independent lexical verbs, share at least one argument, have matching aspect, and are not connected by any linking element (cf.Aikhenvald 2018;Haspelmath 2016;Lovestrand 2018;Schneider 2021).4This section will outline two types of motion SVCs and discuss the sequence of the verbs in order to set the stage for the in-depth discussion of word order.Motion SVCs most often consist of two intransitive verbs,5 and they can be divided into two types: directional and associated motion (cf.Lovestrand & Ross 2021).Directional SVCs consist of two motion verbs, where at least one contributes path information.There are three subtypes of directional SVCs in Hul'q'umi'num': MANNER + PATH (6), PATH + PATH (7) In the first subtype, one of the verbs, most often the first verb (V1), indicates the manner of motion, and the other, most often V2, indicates the direction.In the second subtype, both verbs indicate direction; each verb may encode the starting point, general trajectory, or endpoint.The ordering of the verb components is flexible with a tendency towards a logical ordering such as iconicity or general to specific.The third subtype involves the Hul'q'umi'num' verb huye' 'leave' and another motion verb (either manner or direction).The verb huye' is the most frequently serialized verb in the text corpus, and it also exhibits a strong preference for occurring as the first verb component when serialized.This is in contrast to the MANNER + PATH type, where the directional component tends to occur second, and the PATH + PATH type where the order is flexible and more dependent on semantics and discourse (see Schneider 2022a).Associated motion is defined as a verbal grammatical category whose function is to associate different kinds of translational motion to a verb event (Guillaume & Koch 2021: 3).There are three subtypes of associated motion SVCs in Hul'q'umi'num': concurrent motion ( 9) and ( 10), purposive motion (11), and subsequent motion (12) (cf.Subsequent motion is the least common type of motion SVC in Hul'q'umi'num' (Schneider 2022b) and in the world's languages (Lovestrand & Ross 2021).The arguments are shared in this type of cumulative subject SVC (Aikhenvald 2006: 18). 6The resulting meaning is that 'X did V to Y and then X took Y (somewhere)', and it entails that subject and object moved together in some direction after the non-motion event took place.
To sum up, in directional motion SVCs, the order of the verbs is typically determined either by the construction (e.g., MANNER + PATH), or by the semantics and discourse (e.g., PATH + PATH).Concurrent associated motion SVCs have flexible verb order while sequential associated SVCs most often have temporally iconic verb order.Directional motion SVCs largely consist of two intransitive motion verbs while associated motion SVCs may include a transitive verb component.The next section will zoom out to look at patterns of word order in two-verb SVCs.Instead of being organized in terms of the verb semantics, they are categorized in terms of verb transitivity.Thus, verb order is no longer the focus but instead the analysis will focus on how the arguments are distributed.It is unsurprising that VV is by far the most common type of construction given the tendency of the language to zero out topics, which are usually subjects, and given that the language makes use of second-position clitics for first and second person subjects, rather than NPs.The higher frequency of VSV over VVS shown in Table 1.indicates that there is a preference for an alternating V-NP-V pattern (Gerdts & Schneider 2021).The following sections will now move to transitive constructions.

TRANSITIVE-TRANSITIVE. Table 2 contains eleven possible word order combinations for
SVCs with two transitive verb components (TR-TR).On the left are orders with one or more non-overt NPs, while orders with two overt NP arguments are on the right.While all three of these orders are grammatical and semantically unambiguous, the alternating pattern VSVO in ( 13) is the only corpus-attested pattern.
The remaining three word orders, VVSO (16), VOVS (17) , VOSV (18), tend to elicit ambiguous interpretations and require explicit marking of the subject with the reference-tracking pro-determiner tthuw'nilh in order to be easily understood.
( The constructions in ( 16)-( 18) proved ambiguous without explicit subject marking with a prodeterminer tthuw'nilh; the consultant indicated that in the tthu examples it was unclear if it was 'the boy' who was being sharpened or 'the knife'.Interestingly, the presence of an inanimate object did not seem to improve the chances of the construction being understood correctly.
The alternating VSVO order is both the only construction that occurs in the text corpus and was also preferred by the consultant.The non-occurrence of the other patterns in texts can be explained by an avoidance of ambiguous orders (VVSO, VOVS, VOSV) and the established discourse features of Salish.For example, the fact that in single-verb clauses, two contiguous NPs is dispreferred at least partially explains absence of VVSO/VVOS and VOSV/VSOV in texts.In addition, the tendencies for topics to be subjects, and ongoing topics to be zero likely explains why VOVS does not occur, while VOV, such as ( 19 Without any context, the examples with tthu are unclear as to who is doing the looking, and as before, the presence of tthuw'nilh makes it clear that it is 'the boy'.Similarly to the previous set of examples, the presence of an inanimate object such as 'knife' did not seem to improve the chances of the construction being understood correctly.
In sum, if V1 is intransitive only the shared subject may occur between the verbs; the object of V2 may not intervene.The next section addresses when V1 is transitive and V2 is intransitive.

TRANSITIVE-INTRANSITIVE.
The final type are those that consist of a transitive verb followed by an intransitive one; these constructions are the least common SVC type (>2%).(DL 24.11.22)In (a), 'the elder sibling' is both the object of V1 and the subject of V2 and that sole argument must occur between the verbs in order for the construction to function.In (b), where the O1/S2 argument occurs at the end is ungrammatical.This is the same with a pronominal subject: (26) a. ni' tsun lumnuhw thu q'e'mi '  V1 is transitive and its object is the syntactic subject of V2.This topic of interest is beyond the scope of the current project and will be a focus of future work.
To sum up sections 2.1-2.3, the data suggest that V1 determines the subcategorization for the construction.If V1 is intransitive, only the intransitive subject may occur between the verb components.In contrast, if V1 is transitive, any argument shared by both verbs may occur between verb components.For TR-TR, this can be either the shared subject (most common) or the shared object (when the subject is zero).For TR-INT, the intervening NP is the argument serving as the object of V2 and the subject of V1.Mixed transitivity constructions, such as INT-TR, demonstrate that it is indeed possible to have unshared arguments.This fact leads to questions such as: can the arguments of TR-TR be unshared?This is the topic of the next section.

MORE ON UNSHARED ARGUMENTS.
The next set of questions to address here concern constructions with two transitive verbs but different objects.In the text corpus, this most often follows one of two different patterns: (i) a repeated object with different verbs, and (ii) a repeated verb with different objects, or some combination of the two patterns.Example ( 29 Here the two verbs suw'q't 'search for it' and t'uhwstuhw 'bring it downhill' represent two distinct events happening to the same object.DL said that this sentence did not make sense without the comma (28.12.22).When I attempted to merge these two events into one event of going out and getting deer, it was rejected: (30) *ni' nem' suw'q'tus kwu smuyuth t'uhwstuhwus.*niʔ nem ̓ səw ̓ q ̓ -t-əs kʷə sməyəθ t ̓ əxʷ-stəxʷ-əs DIST.AUX go.DIR search-TR-3SUB DT deer go.downhill-CS-3SUBIntended: 'He went deer hunting and brought it down the mountain.'(DL 28.12.22)The problem with this example is that the verb suw'q't 'search for it' does not entail finding the item being searched for.This has to be treated as two distinct events; one can conceptually understand that the subject found what they were looking for during some space in between the events in a sentence like (29), but an SVC cannot be used to describe something like this.
The corpus example in (31) provides another example of how the same object can be repeated across multiple verbs, and there is also repetition of the verb root.In this example there are three verbs, the features of which have been laid out in Each verb in this example has its own arguments; all three verbs share the referent 'the loon' which is expressed each time as an overt NP.Each verb also has a different aspect; the first verb is perfective, the second is imperfective, and the third is durative.Serialized verbs are expected to match in terms of clausal categories such as tense, aspect, mood, and modality (Aikhenvald 2018:1).Thus, the shift in aspect, alongside repeated overt NP marking of 'the loon', is evidence that these should be treated as multiple clauses, rather than a single one.
The next set of examples in ( 32) and ( 33) represent identical verbs with different objects.

kill-3POS
DT what food-3POS 'There was no law to stop the First Nations People from catching all the different kinds of food.' q'aytus kwthu smuyuth, q'aytus thu kwewe'uts, q'aytus thu stseelhtun.
mək ̓ ʷ stem sʔiʔłtən̓ -s sməyəθ kʷeweʔəc speʔəθ all what food-3POS deer elk bear 'They have everything to eat-deer, elk, bear.' (ST) (Gerdts & Gilkison 2018: 6) The NPs here represent an open list of exemplars, and the items are conceived of individually (Gerdts & Gilkison 2018: 6).Given this, ( 32) and ( 33), which have identical verbs with different objects and no linking elements, can also be treated as open lists of exemplars.

Conclusion.
In SVCs, the verb components describe a single event (or very closely related subevents).The following table sums up the findings thus far for the syntactic and discourse factors that influence the why certain word orders with overt NPs do (not) occur in the corpus.2).V1 determines the subcategorization for the construction because only an argument shared by both verb components may intervene between them.If V1 is intransitive (INT-INT and INT-TR) only the shared subject may occur between the verb components.In contrast, if V1 is transitive (TR-TR and TR-INT), either the shared subject (most common) or the shared object (when the subject is zero) can occur between the verb components.For TR-INT, the intervening argument is the one serving as the object of V2 and the subject of V1.
Repetition of an object NP indicates a larger and less tight-knit clause structure than that of SVCs.In a repetition verb chain, the verb roots and/or the object arguments are repeated.Examples like (30) demonstrate that certain subevents cannot be combined to form an SVC.In contrast, if the subevents are close enough conceptually, they can be represented by either a repetition verb chain (36), or an SVC (37) with only very slight differences in meaning: ( While both of these constructions are grammatical, (36) gives a more separated sense, where the more general 'prepare the knife' is used first and then the concept is rephrased more specifically 'sharpen the knife'.In contrast, (37) presents a more unified reading and it is clear that prepare and sharpen describe aspects of the same event.Pawley (2009: 139-140) describes a similar phenomenon in Kalam (ISO 639-3 kmh), where SVCs are a preferred option when the story-teller does not want to differentiate between stages of a composite action.Similar to (36), two different verbs that share a subject but have different objects are also conceptualized as making up distinct events in (38).The young man sharpened the knife, prepared the deer (meat).' (DL 24.11.22)In this example, there is no repetition of verb root or object NP, and they are linked by the shared subject.It is clear that there are two distinct events: sharpening the knife and preparing the deer (meat).This type of construction will be treated as a verb chain, keeping with Schneider (2021).Finally, there are cases where multiple verbs are used much like a list.In (34), for example, an identical form of the verb 'kill it' is repeated, each time with a different animal that was killed for food.In these cases, a verb is repeated in series with different object NPs that represent an open list of exemplars.
In sum, the paper investigated the word order of Hul'q'umi'num' SVCs.Most often SVCs consist of two verbs, either intransitive or transitive.Constructions with three or more verbs are attested but have been set aside for now.For two-verb constructions with two overt NPs, an alternating VSVO pattern is preferred, and only shared arguments may intervene between the verb components.Hul'q'umi'num' SVCs exhibit remarkably flexible word order in elicitation, but certain grammatically possible word orders generate ambiguity.Various discourse and pragmatic strategies work together to prevent or rescue ambiguous constructions.SVCs are an understudied feature of Central Salish languages and so it is an important area of research in the subfield.The fact that Hul'q'umi'num' is a synthetic, predicate-initial language, and yet exhibits non-contiguous SVCs with an alternating VSVO pattern is unexpected in light of generalizations made by current SVC literature, thus investigation of this topic also broadens the scope of the typology.ADDITIONAL ABBREVIATIONS.< >: non-concatenative morphology, CN: connective element, CNJ: conjunction, CS: causative, DIR: directional (verb), DT: determiner, DYN: dynamic, INCH: inchoative, INT: intransitive, LCTR: limited control transitive, N: nominalizer, PAS: passive, POS: possessive; PRO.DT: pro-determiner; RL: rhetorical lengthening, ST: stative, SUB: subject, V1 : first verb in series, V2: second verb in series, VBL: verbalizing prefix.
syntax.The most frequently occurring type of SVC in the text corpus is an intransitive-intransitive (INT-INT) construction.This includes the vast majority of the directional motion constructions discussed previously.For INT-INT SVCs (

Table 1 )
VV is by far the most common order, with an alternating VSV pattern being the next most common.

Table 3 .
), is attested and unambiguous.This section discussed constructions where both verb components are transitive and both subject and object are shared.Either argument may intervene between verb components; this can be either the shared subject (most common) or the shared object (when the subject is zero).The next sections will address constructions with an intransitive and a transitive verb component.2.2.INTRANSITIVE-TRANSITIVE.Mixed-transitivity constructions involve one shared argument and one non-shared argument.In INT-TR constructions (Table3), the subject is shared, and the transitive component functions to add an object into the argument structure.Intransitive-Transitive word order combinations These constructions are limited to VSVO, VVOS, and VVSO as possible orders with overt NP arguments because the object cannot precede the transitive verb, as demonstrated by (20).

Table 4 .
Table4below shows the corpus counts; the subject argument is never expressed as an overt NP, and thus the pro-determiner distinction is irrelevant for this construction.Transitive-Intransitive word order combinations Like the previous constructions, the argument between the verbs is shared; in this case, the shared argument is the object of V1 and the subject of V2 (marked [O1/S2]), demonstrated in (24).

t-əs yə=xʷ-t ̓ ᶿət ̓ ᶿaʔ-t-əm ̓
Passive verbs do not behave identically to intransitive ones because the syntactic structure of the passive has only a subject, which is the undergoer of the action.The reduced ambiguity allows for a transitive-passive VV[O1/S2] order, as demonstrated by the example below.

Table 6 .
Transitive word orders with overt NP arguments 8 VSVO is the only construction with overt NP arguments that does not fail any of the principles.If a construction fails PI (predicate-initial), it is ungrammatical and cannot be rescued.If a construction fails either *2NP (avoid adjacent NPs) or Unamb.(unambiguous), it is grammatical but unlikely to occur in natural speech.Ambiguous constructions can be rescued by means of a subject marking pro-determiner, but as rescuing an ambiguous construction likely requires additional effort, this does not happen often.Pro-determiners are more often used to rescue transitive constructions that violate the ONI condition (two cases of VSV in Table 36) ni' thuytus tthu shuptun yuq'utus tthu shuptun tthuw'nilh swiw'lus.