124 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 191 



SYNTAX 



In "Morphology," words were described and classified on the basis 

 of their internal structure. The emphasis in this section is on the 

 grammatical function of words and phrases and the sequential arrange- 

 ment of functional units. The word-class categories of the previous 

 section are abandoned except in describing the kinds of words which 

 may fill a function slot. This approach is adopted for the reason 

 that there is in Santa Ana Keresan a lack of correlation between 

 structural classes and function classes. Words which structurally are 

 verbs, for instance, may have not only a verblike function but may 

 have a nounlike function as sa-mA in the following example: 



yuk^- sa-mA ^e sa zuse I am going home 



that way my home back I go 



DEFINITION OF SYNTACTIC UNITS 



Syntactic structure will be analyzed in terms of function slots. 

 The term is used here to mean a position within the clause or larger 

 syntactic unit which is characterized by : 



1. A more or less fixed location in relation to other function slots. 

 This does not imply an absolutely rigid sequential ordering of elements 

 within the clause, but rather a relatively narrow limit to the kinds of 

 sequences which are admissible. 



2. A uniform grammatical function assignable to the slot together 

 with the elements which may fill that slot. These grammatical 

 functions (e.g., subject, object, predicate) will be discussed in detail 

 on pp. 126 ff. 



3. The potentiality of being filled by a single word. This criterion 

 defines the lower limit of a function unit. Any position within the 

 clause that is always filled by more than one word is not a single 

 function slot. 



4. The potentiality of being filled by a continuous sequence of words. 

 A function slot, therefore, may be filled alternatively by a single word 

 or by a sequence of words that are functionally equivalent to a single 

 word. Such a sequence of words constitutes a phrase. Two or more 

 non-contiguous positions within a clause which are filled by words 

 or phrases having the same or similar grammatical function will be 

 treated as separate slots rather than a single discontinuous slot. 



The usual definition of a clause as a sequence of words containing 

 a subject and predicate needs to be modified somewhat for the purposes 

 of describing Santa Ana syntactic structure. The term clause will be 

 understood to refer to a syntactic unit which includes a verb function- 

 ing as a predicate as well as to certain other relatively infrequently 

 occurring types of units to be described below. A predicate clause in 



