SENĆOŦEN: A Grammar of the Saanich Language Main Menu Contents Preface Acknowledgments PART 1 Introduction The organization of this grammar The Place of SENĆOŦEN in the Salishan Language Family Basics of the SENĆOŦEN word Useful phrases PART 2 The SENĆOŦEN Alphabet and Sounds Consonants Vowels and Diphthongs Notes on Pronunciation PART 3 SENĆOŦEN Grammatical Patterns 1 Transitive and Intransitive Verbs 2 Past and Future Tense 3 Basic Speech Acts 4 Nouns and Articles 5 Possessive Pronouns 6 Adjectives 7 Basic Word Order 8 The Preposition 9 Serial Verbs 10 Auxiliaries 11 Conjunction: ‘And/with’ and ‘but/without’ 12 No and Not 13 Self and Each Other 14 More Negative Words 15 Questions: ‘Who?,’ ‘What?,’ ‘Someone,’ ‘Something’ 16 Questions: ‘Do what?,’ ‘Say what?,’ and ‘Which one?’ 17 Subordinate Subjects in Questions 18 Questions: ‘Whose?’ 19 Every, All, Any, and Some 20 Comparison 21 Questions: ‘When?’ 22 Numbers 23 Time Expressions 24 Time Prefixes 25 Questions: ‘Where?’ 26 Location Expressions 27 Paths 28 Questions: ‘How?’ and ‘How much?’ 29 Adverbial Expressions 30 Conditional Clauses 31 Should, Must, Ought to, Want to 33 Passive 34 Strong, Weak, and Zero Stems 35 Participant Roles and Middle Voice 36 Recipient, Beneficiary, and Other Participants 37 Lexical Suffixes 38 Questions: ‘Why?’ 39 Because 40 Cause 41 Collective Plural 42 The Actual Aspect 43 State, Result, and Duration 44 Activity Suffixes 45 Reflexive, Inchoative, and Noncontrol Middle 46 Ȼ Clauses 47 Relative Clauses 48 Speech Act Modifiers 49 Possessed Verbs 50 Summary of Particles with Ȼ 51 So Then ... 52 Reporting Verbs and Direct Quotes 53 Indirect Quotes 54 Verbal Prefixes 55 Nominalizing Prefixes 56 Adverbial Prefixes 57 More Demonstrative Articles 58 Objects of Intent and Emotion 59 More Reduplication Patterns 60 Interjections 61 Politeness Expressions 62 Rare Prefixes and Suffixes 63 A Fully Annotated Text 64 Texts to Annotate Appendix A: Technical Description of SENĆOŦEN Sounds Appendix B: SENĆOŦEN Pronouns Appendix C: Demonstrative Articles Appendix D: SENĆOŦEN Kin Terms Appendix E: Index to Technical Linguistic Topics Appendix F: Vocabulary Bibliography SENĆOŦEN Dictionary Basic SENĆOŦEN Dictionary without root and affix indexes

32 Object Pronouns

43373 59 More Reduplication Patterns
The direct object always occurs with a transitive verb (review §1). It is typically the person or thing undergoing the action. For example, in English ‘You helped me,’ the word ‘me’ is the direct object.

A brief digression before we get to the grammar of SENĆOŦEN object pronouns:

Object pronouns are an important part of any grammar. They are usually described and listed early in the written grammar of a language. In the Klallam Grammar, for example, the object pronouns are covered in chapter seven. However, in this SENĆOŦEN grammar we have waited until §32 to discuss them. There are three interconnected reasons for waiting so long to introduce the object suffixes. These issues are true for Klallam as well as SENĆOŦEN.

First, the object suffixes are not often used. The first- and second-person object pronouns were easy to elicit from the oldest L1 (first language) speakers, so we have a great many elicited examples, but they appear naturally in texts only very rarely. We have transcribed thousands of pages of hundreds of narratives and conversations from many native speaking elders; the SENĆOŦEN first and second person objects appear fewer than a dozen times. The main reason for this rarity is the SENĆOŦEN (and the same can be said for Klallam) preference for using intransitive constructions. The passive construction (already introduced in §7, §8, §12, and §14) is particularly important in this regard. The usual way to express an idea like ‘My mother helped me’ is not with the transitive construction and object suffix corresponding to ‘me’ but with a passive construction meaning ‘I was helped by my mother.’ The passive construction has some complications that will be covered in §34.

Second, it seems that as some endangered languages decline—being used less and less by fewer speakers—the object pronouns suffer more than other areas of grammar. While elicitation of object pronouns from the oldest L1 speakers with robust grammatical intuitions was easy, younger L1 speakers falter and forget. This certainly must be due to the natural scarcity of the object pronouns in ordinary discourse combined with the general decline in use of the language. Nevertheless, younger L1 speakers can understand object pronouns without difficulty when they do occasionally appear in natural discourse, and, importantly, they can speak the language fluently with very little or no use of object pronouns.

Third, a lot can be said about the grammar without referring to object pronouns. As this book demonstrates, over 110 pages of the major details of SENĆOŦEN grammar can be described without mention of the object pronouns. This cannot be said about the subject pronouns, possessive pronouns, or the passive construction, all of which have been mentioned repeatedly.

Nevertheless, a thorough understanding of the language requires knowledge of the object pronouns. So study this section carefully.

The digression ends here. It is time to get back to the grammar of SENĆOŦEN.

In SENĆOŦEN, the direct object is indicated as a suffix on the transitive verb. There are several forms of these object suffixes. Which form is used depends on several factors.

The most important factor in SENĆOŦEN is whether the person doing the action (which we will call the actor) is in control of the action or not. For example, in English ‘I look at it,’ the actor, ‘I,’ is in control of the action. When you ‘look at’ something, you do it on purpose. On the other hand, in English ‘I see it,’ the actor, ‘I,’ is not necessarily in control. When you ‘see’ something you may not be doing it on purpose‑it may be accidental.

Where English uses two separate verbs to show this ‘on purpose’ versus ‘accidental’ idea, SENĆOŦEN uses different verb endings and different object pronouns.

The suffix ‑ET (sometimes just ‑T) on a verb indicates that the actor is in control. The ending ‑NEW̱ (sometimes ‑NOW̱) on a verb indicates that the actor is not in control. So, for example, QENET means ‘look at it,’ while QENNEW̱ means ‘see it.’

The words QENET and QENNEW̱ have the same root (QEN‑) but different suffixes (‑ET and ‑NEW̱). In some SENĆOŦEN words, the root may stand alone, but the root in these two words, QEN‑ may not. The hyphen on QEN‑ indicates that something must attach there. Similarly, the hyphens on ‑ET and ‑NEW̱ indicate that they have to attach to something. The root of a word is what is left when all suffixes and prefixes are removed.
 

This page has paths:

  1. PART 3 SENĆOŦEN Grammatical Patterns Montler, et al.

Contents of this path:

  1. 32.1. Object pronouns (subject in control): ET verbs
  2. 32.2. Object pronouns (subject not in control): NEW̱ verbs

This page has tags:

  1. 1.2. Transitive subject pronouns Montler, et al.
  2. 11.1. ‘And’ and ‘with’ Montler, et al.
  3. 49 Possessed Verbs Montler, et al.
  4. 58 Objects of Intent and Emotion Montler, et al.
  5. 48.6. ÁL¸ṈEN ‘want to do,’ STEN¸OM¸ET ‘pretend to do’ Montler, et al.

Contents of this tag:

  1. 1 Transitive and Intransitive Verbs
  2. 7 Basic Word Order
  3. 8 The Preposition
  4. 34 Strong, Weak, and Zero Stems
  5. 14 More Negative Words