Pp. xxx + 282. The last two decades of the twentieth century saw the publication of several major reference works on Salishan languages (e.g.In its own way, each of these works has had to strike an uneasy balance between the need for comprehensive, detailed, and accessible documentation of a language and the need for theoretically relevant and original linguistic analysis. In the case of Salishan languages, the tension between these two goals is made more acute by the fact that this language

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... ily is not only theoretically interesting and typologically unusual but is also severely endangered, the majority of surviving Salishan languages having fewer than 20 fluent, elderly speakers. The two grammars under review here represent diametrically opposed responses to these issues, and the contrast between them raises questions about the responsibilities of linguists working with endangered languages both to their profession and to the communities they work with. Davis and Saunders's A Grammar of Bella Coola falls clearly on the theoretical side of the divide. It is a concise and challenging exposition of certain aspects of Bella Coola (Nuxalk) morphosyntax, couched in terms of an original analytical framework familiar from previous writings (e.g., Davis and Saunders 1986; 1989) and briefly expounded, using English examples, in the first chapter of this book. The next chapter turns to Bella Coola and outlines what are generally termed clause structure and argument structure, though here these together are referred to as PROP-OSITIONAL ORGANIZATION. PROPOSITIONAL ORGANIZATION manifests itself on two distinct levels, the semantic level of the EVENT and the grammatical level of the PROPOSITION. The realization of event PARTICIPANTS in the clause depends on their NUCLEARITY or PERIPHERALITY both to the EVENT and in the PROPOSITION itself. This idea is most transparent on the PROPOSITIONAL level, where the concepts of NUCLE-ARITY and PERIPHERALITY capture the distinction in Salishan studies between the direct and the indirect, or oblique, complement, e.g.: (la) kaw-is ti-?imlk-tx ti-yatn-tx bring-3sG:3sG DET-man-DET DET-rattle-DET 'the man brought the rattle'