This project will complete a dictionary of Montana Salish, a Southern Interior Salishan language. It will also include a collection of analyzed texts introduced by a grammatical sketch that focuses on explanations of the terms and functions of the grammatical morphemes in the texts.
The extensive material in the thousand-page 1877- 79 dictionary of Montana Salish will be incorporated into this dictionary in a form that makes it readily accessible to linguists. The database includes systematic coverage of cognates from Spokane, a dialect of the same (nameless) language as Montana Salish, and from Colville-Okanagan, a closely-related language, as well as numerous cognates from other Salishan languages.
Both of these features will make the dictionary a valuable resource for historical research on Salishan languages. In addition, the l9th-century material, partially re-elicited from current speakers, comprises an unusually rich set of elaborate morphological data on a polysynthetic language data which, in its present form, can be used only with great difficulty. All this material has implications for theoretical concerns in a number of areas: historical phonology (e.g. the poorly understood phenomenon of irregular sound change), synchronic phonology (e.g. truncation), morphology (e.g. the unusually complex overt morphological representation of event structure), syntax (e.g. the interplay between pronominal arguments and the case marking of NP adjuncts or arguments), and discourse (e.g. the tracking of participants in a text). Both the texts and the dictionary files display features that are unusual cross-linguistically and in part even within Salishan studies.
The dictionary and texts will be published in hard copy, and the full dictionary files will be made available through the Web.
