Pronominal Clitics and Indexability Hierarchies in Hanis and Miluk Coosan

The subject and object pronominal clitics of the two Coosan languages, Hanis and Miluk, and their associations with inflectional affixes of the verb are examined on the basis of available text corpora, supplementing and correcting Frachtenberg’s original description of the Hanis forms. In Hanis, an additional proclitic position must be recognized in certain imperative and transitive clauses, differing syntactically from the position of the ordinary proclitics; also, the Algonquian-like hierarchy privileging second person over first person that holds for singular enclitics requires modification for nonsingular ones. In Miluk, the pronominal enclitics differ dramatically from the Hanis proclitics in syntactic position and in some cases also in shape, but in most other respects seem comparable in behavior, as do patterns of inflectional suffixation of verbs. Brief comparative remarks are offered on other languages of the southerly Pacific Northwest.