Coast Tsimshian Language - Morphology

Morphology

Coast Tsimshian can be classified as a polysynthetic language, although it is less so than other Native North American languages. Tense, for instance, is not marked with the verb, but always appears as a separate pre-verbal word. The verb stands out as the most important word in the sentence—much of the information can be expressed by affixing onto it. Nouns, however, do have a number of clitics that may be attached. There are multiple connectors that are suffixed or prefixed onto adjacent words which can create long strings of lexical items.

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