This special volume of CJL/RCL is the first collection of papers devoted specifically to the Southern Wakashan languages Makah, Ditidaht (also known as Nitinat), and Nuu-chah-nulth (also known as Nootka). These three closely related languages form a continuum stretching from the northwest tip of Washington State to northwest Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The Southern Wakashan languages are remarkable for the typologically unusual traits they exhibit in virtually all areas of their grammars. These properties were first illuminated by Edward Sapir in his foundational work on Nuu-chah-nulth (1911, 1915, 1921; Sapir and Swadesh 1939), which helped thrust Wakashan to the forefront of early Amerindian scholarship. The papers brought together in this volume reflect a recent resurgence of interest in Southern Wakashan, and highlight the potential of lesser-studied languages to contribute to linguistic theory, as well as the range of insights that theoretically informed perspectives can bring to the grammatical description of these languages.

The Southern Wakashan (or Nootkan) languages exhibit a sort of chain relationship, from south to north: Makah, Nitinat, and Nootka. Given the intermediate geographic position of Nitinat with respect to Makah (situated more to the south) and Nootka (situated more to the north), one can ask which of these languages is most closely related to Nitinat. At present, this question remains unresolved, as reflected by the disagreement in the literature. Relying primarily on lexical data, but also considering aspects of sound changes and grammatical criteria, it is proposed that the closer grouping of Nitinat is with Makah.

Previous phonetic documentation of Nuu-chah-nulth consonant-vowel interactions has either solely relied on transcriptions or has been incomplete in some other respect. Using auditory, acoustic, and articulatory evidence, this article documents the effects of all post-velar consonants on all vowels. Results show that /i/ and /i:/ almost always have a schwa offglide before the uvular and pharyngeal stops, but not always before the fricatives. When these vowels follow uvulars and pharyngeals (with the exception of the labialized uvular), they are usually lowered and do not have a schwa offglide. Ultrasound data confirm that the tongue root is active in articulating uvular and pharyngeal consonants and that the schwa off-glide occurs because the tongue is moving through a schwa-like configuration on its way from the high front vowel to the retracted consonant. The vowels /u/ and /u:/ are lowered and/or diphthongized following (but not preceding) pharyngeals, and they are unaffected by uvulars.

Among the Southern Wakashan languages, Ditidaht has patterns of short vowel epenthesis and deletion that are unusually complex. It is shown that the surface presence or absence of short vowels is determined not by their underlying presence or absence, but by how segments are parsed by prosodic constituents. An optimality theoretic analysis is developed, according to which vowel alternations result from the low ranking of faithfulness constraints (Max/V and Dep/V) relative to constraints on the forms of syllables, feet, and prosodic words. Vowel presence creates ideal iambic feet, makes prosodic words minimally disyllabic, and ensures that adducted consonants (those that involve adducting the vocal folds for glottalization or voicing) are vowel-adjacent. Vowel absence ensures that prosodic words end in consonants, and eliminates unfooted syllables. An additional finding is that all adducted consonants must be postvocalic.

Multiple reduplication is rare: the most often cited case is that of Salish double reduplication, which has been analyzed within the framework of Optimality Theory. For this reason, the simple and double reduplication processes found in Nuuchahnulth (Nootka) have theoretically interesting consequences for current models of morphology. This article demonstrates that Nuuchahnulth double reduplication challenges the standard, parallelist optimality theoretic account. An alternative analysis in terms of Stratal Optimality Theory is presented: the multistratal model is argued to be superior to the mono-stratal one, as the latter misses generalizations and fails to make correct predictions.

The syntactic behaviour of the object marker ?uukwił in Nuu-chah-nulth is documented based on fieldwork data that illustrate patterns not previously discussed in the literature. A Minimalist-type analysis is presented, in which ?uukwił is a light verb of the category v and is generated in the complement position of the main verb. This captures certain traits of ?uukwił that have hitherto not been unified under a single analysis: its morphological and syntactic autonomy, its semantic dependence on another predicate for argument structure, its link to discourse saliency, and its use as an auxiliary item in A′-raising constructions.

Nuu-chah-nulth possessor raising is semantically unrestricted and affects only subjects: subject agreement matches the person and number of the possessor (rather than the possessed subject), and the possessive-marking clitic attaches to the head of the clause (rather than to the possessum). Nuu-chah-nulth possessor raising is analyzed as a syntactic dependency between the possessive clitic in the main clause and the base-generated possessor position within DP. A Possessive Phrase can appear in either the DP or the clausal domain, and the possessive clitic may be generated in either position. When the possessive clitic is generated in the main clause, a possessor may raise out of subject position via feature-driven movement; the Minimal Link Condition prevents such movement from occurring out of object position.

Nuu-chah-nulth presents a set of exceptions to Condition C of the Binding Theory that involves co-construal between certain R-expressions and a c-commanding pronoun. These exceptions to Condition C are not reducible to structural properties of the language, and are not confined to coreference anaphora, as they extend to bound variables without quantificational antecedents. Nuu-chah-nulth also shows strong crossover effects, and more generally obeys a strict c-command condition on variables bound by quantifiers. We account for these facts by distinguishing quantifier binding from other types of dependent reference, and parameterize the latter based on reverse dependency, where a pronoun may precede and/or c-command its antecedent. Reverse dependency reflects the non-presuppositional nature of Nuu-chah-nulth pronouns, which allows them to be introduced ahead of their descriptive content.