BOAS] HANDBOOK OF AMERICAN INDIAN LANGUAGES 575 



future and perfect and of the indefinite aoristic time, to which are 

 added in Upper Chinook several other past tenses. In some cases 

 these temporal elements express rather ideas that laayi be termed 

 transitional and continuative. There is a series of semitemporal 

 suffixes expressing the inchoative and varieties of frequentatives; 

 and also a number of directive prefixes, which seem to express the 

 direction of the action in relation to the speaker. 



All other ideas are expressed by particles. A somewhat abnormal 

 position among these is occupied by the numerals from 2 to 9 and by 

 a very few adjectives. These numerals are nouns when they are 

 used as ordinals; when used as adjectives, they are generally par- 

 ticles; when referring to human beings, they are nouns of peculiar 

 form (§ 51). 



Most remarkable among the particles is a long series of words, 

 many of which are onomatopoetic and which are mostly used to 

 express verbal ideas. In this case the verbal relation is expressed by 

 an auxiliary verb which signifies to do, to make, or to be. These 

 words exhibit a gradation from purely interjectional terms to true 

 adverbial or, more generally, attributive forms. They are analogous 

 to our English forms like bang went the gun, or ding dong made 

 THE BELLS, and merge into forms like he was tired. If we imagine 

 the word tired pronounced with imitative gestures and expression, 

 it attains the value that these particles have in Chinook. The num- 

 ber of these words is considerable, and they take the place of many 

 verbs. Most of them can be used only with verbs like to do and 

 to go. Other adverbs differ from this class in that they are used 

 with other verbs as well. There is no clear distinction between these 

 adverbs and conjunctions. 



DISCUSSION OF GRAMMAR (§§ 16-56) 



Syntactic Words (§§ 16-45) 



§16. Structure of St/ntactic Words 



All syntactic words contain pronominal elements which give them 

 a predicative character. A few seem to contain only the pronominal 

 element and the stem, but by far the greater number contain other 

 elements besides. Most words of this class are built up by compo- 

 sition of a long series of elements, all of which are phonetically too 



§16 



