THE PROBLEM OF CATEGORIZATION OF THE WORLD AT THE INITIAL STAGE OF THE LANGAUGE DEVELOPMENT (within the Framework of the Salishan Language Squamish)

The material of the endangered Salishan language Squamish is of great importance for the universal principle of constructing a diachronic linguistic structure. Based on the analysis of the vocabu-lary and text material of the Salishan language Squamish the author comes to the hypothesis that in the pro-cess of categorization at the initial stages of the language development the world was perceived as a dynamic phenomenon, which led to the dominance of the verbal predicate, that went through the process of nomi-nalization to express arguments of the sentence. The analysis of the means of transferring substantive vocabulary in the Squamish-English dictionary and in the Squamish text indicates that the majority of the linguistic units of the substantive vocabulary of the language are represented by derivatives, which are actually nominal verbal predicates. Thus, the material of the Squamish language, as well as other Salishan languages, suggests that the categorization of the world at the initial stages of the language development was based on the processes of polycategorization / recategorization of the verb, i.e. in the diachronic model of the grammatical categories at the initial stages of the language development, the omnipresence of the verbal predicate dominated, which recycled to perform the function of the argument.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC

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