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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 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 32 Object Pronouns 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

9 Serial Verbs

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In §8 you learned that SENĆOŦEN has only one preposition. English has around fifty of these small words that come before noun phrases and indicate notions like location, position, and direction. Some examples of English prepositions are ‘up,’ ‘down,’ ‘to,’ ‘on,’ ‘at,’ ‘beside,’ ‘between,’ and ‘from.’ It may have occurred to you to wonder, since SENĆOŦEN has only one preposition, how does it express all of these location and direction ideas? The answer to this is that location and direction are expressed in SENĆOŦEN and other Coast Salishan languages primarily by the use of verbs that indicate direction and location as well as motion.

It is verbs in SENĆOŦEN, not prepositions, as in English, that express the ideas of ‘up,’ ‘down,’ ‘to,’ ‘on,’ ‘at,’ ‘beside,’ ‘between,’ ‘from,’ and so on. This is a major difference between SENĆOŦEN and English. Another major difference is that these verbs can be strung out in the sentence one after another. Verbs used in a series with only one subject are called serial verbs.

English can string two or three verbs together in some limited ways. An example is ‘run go get help,’ where three verbs ‘run,’ ‘go,’ and ‘get’ are strung together. However, in English this is not generally usable. For example, in English we cannot say ‘*I ran go got help’ or anything similar with verbs in series. In SENĆOŦEN, on the other hand, this kind of sentence, with one subject and two or more verbs is very common.

In this section, you will see examples of how these serial verbs work in SENĆOŦEN. Not every verb can be freely used in series—most common are verbs that indicate motion or location.
 

This page has paths:

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

Contents of this path:

  1. 9.1. Intransitive motion verbs in series
  2. 9.2. Transitive and passive verbs in series

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  1. 27 Paths Montler, et al.
  2. 26 Location Expressions Montler, et al.