On apparent nominal coordination in gitksan*

This paper investigates coordination in Gitksan, an endangered Tsimshianic language natively spoken in the northern interior region of British Columbia. Specifically, I investigate the behavior of g̲an, a morpheme which has in the past been described as a nominal coordinator (Rigsby 1986; Livingston 1989), despite displaying some non-canonical behaviors. This paper considers g̲an’s non-canonical syntax and investigates whether a syntactic analysis of it as a “coordinator” is indeed appropriate. There are two apparent coordinatingmorphemes in Gitksan: the clausal coordinator ii, and the phrasal coordinator g̲an, which conjoins nominals and PP elements (Forbes 2013). Here, I focus on describing the properties of g̲an when it coordinates nominals. An example is provided below in (1), where three nominals are conjoined as the argument of the intransitive locative verb dox̲. Note that word order in Gitksan is strictly predicate-initial, specifically VS and VAO.1