Syntax, prepositions, and affixes or clitics make the functions of words unambiguous. Teonaht likes the verb to be final, and absolute in form. Largely morphologically accusative. This may be a holdover from an old ergative system, or a borrowing, or an over correction. It is as if the Agent is seen as the thinking, intending subject and the Participant as the shadow of the self, perhaps even not the self.
Inanimate things can govern transitive verbs, but they are usually marked as Participants.
It is entirely typical of the early Teonaht grammarians to name the parts of speech after the parts of an inhabitable structure, for they saw language to be a means of moving through space, categorizing it, living in it, making it coherent.