Anthropological Linguistics Vol. Wolfgang-E. Scharlipp 301 Abstracts Grammatical Convergence and the Genesis of Diversity in the Northwest Coast Sprachbund David Beck University of Alberta Abstract. The Pacific Northwest boasts one of the world s most extensive Sprachb nde, which encompasses several controversial genetic phyla, including Mosan, uniting Salishan, Wakashan, and Chimakuan. This article argues that Mosan is not a genetic, but an areal grouping of Central Northwest languages that have come, through millennia of contact, to resemble each other to a remarkable degree. Within this language complex, the Salishan outlier Bella Coola has gone even further than other Salishan languages in approxi mation to its Wakashan neighbors, and the novel features of this language illustrate both grammatical convergence and diversification, the latter being frequently overlooked in models of language interaction.
Number marking on nouns is an inflectional category that languages apparently can do without.
On the other hand, some languages or language families tend to have extremely rich number-marking systems. The Nilo-Saharan family provides a case in point. This article describes formal and semantic properties of this system from synchronic and diachronic points of view and explains its historical relative stability in Nilo-Saharan. Although few formal parallels for this type of number inflection are found elsewhere in the world, clear-cut functional parallels exist.