A Taxonomy and Typology of Lushootseed Valency‐Increasing Suffixes

A great deal has been written about causatives and applicatives, yet efforts to relate these two types of valency-increaser are still in their early stages. This paper is an attempt to develop a unified treatment using data from the Salishan language Lushootseed, which derives its transitive verb stems from intransitive radicals using a variety of valency- increasing suffixes. This paper proposes a taxonomy of these suffixes based on two pa- rameters—the distinction between a causative, which adds a subject, and an applicative, which adds an object, and the distinction between direct and nondirect—that is, whether the causee or the applied object is a direct object or is more oblique. This study also touches on some current debates in Salishan studies about whether these morphemes are inflectional or derivational, and the extent to which verbal radicals can be treated as uniformly unaccusative, a characterization of the family that has been used to motivate some significant claims about language universals.