Speech errors in nominalized clauses: A clitic to affix shift in Thompson River Salish morphology*

Subject agreement morphology in Thompson River Salish (TRS) is shifting from clitic status to affix status. This study presents new fieldwork data from this critically endangered language, including the first ever systematic analysis of speech errors in a Native American language. This clitic-to-affix shift is occuring in nominalized clauses, and indicates that nominalization agreement morphology is changing syntactic position. The data thus offer a synchronous view of morphological changes that have previously only been considered from a historical-comparative perspective (eg. Newman 1979, 1980, Davis 1999), and reveal insights into how agreement morphology is processed at the interface between phonology and morpho-syntax