Babine, which has also been known as Northern Carrier, has two major dialects, Lake Babine (LB) spoken in Babine Lake and River Babine (RB) spoken in Bulkley River in northwestern British Columbia. The speakers of the latter in Moricetown and Hagwilgate prefer to call their language [wətsowət’en]. The recognition of Babine as a language distinct from Carrier is based on the work of Hildebrandt and Story (1974), Kari (1975), and Story (1984). In claiming Babine as a distinct language, rather than a Carrier dialect, Story (1984:1) cites “the Babine vowel shift”. She presents an extensive discussion of the historical process of vowel shift conditioned by two categories of syllable-initial consonants, which she calls F(ortis)-Mutation and L(enis)-Mutation.

The experiment reported on here investigating the syllabic attachment of post-vocalic nasals and l grew out of an earlier experiment which compared the post-vocalic liquids r and l (Laubstein 1989). Using the error elicitation technique described in Motley et al (1983), induced errors involving Vr and Vl sequences were compared. The two sequences behaved quite differently, suggesting different syllabic attachments for the two liquids. Vowel-r sequences consistently interacted with single vowels or vowel glide sequences and such sequences never split up, supporting the hypothesis (based on naturally occurring errors) that vowel-r sequences belong to a uni-positional peak constituent and supporting Kahn’s argument that English r, like w and y, is a glide (Kahn 1976). Vowel-l sequences, on the other hand, did split apart; errors involved the l alone or the vowel alone, significantly more often than they involved the r or V alone from Vr sequences (Wilcoxon p <.0001). This supported the hypothesis that the r and l belonged to different constituents. The relative frequency of errors is commonly assumed to reflect constituency. See, for instance, Stemberger and Treiman’s (1986) arguments regarding different positions in the onset. Nevertheless, such sequences also acted as single units, and in this respect behaved like vowel-r sequences. In addition, when such sequences were involved as a unit they interacted with single vowels or vowel glide sequences, suggesting that at some level of analysis they belonged to the same constituents as vowels. Speech errors which involve interactions between two items, or the substitution of one item for another, are in general structure-preserving. They involve units of the same constituent type at some level of analysis; for instance, noun phrase with noun phrase, preposition with preposition, verb with verb, and at the sub-lexical level, syllabic constituent type a with syllabic constituent type a (Laubstein 1987).

This paper examines cognate object (CO) constructions such as those in (1).

1. 1. a. Dorothea smiled a smile.

   2. b. Dorothea smiled a wicked smile.

   3. c. Dorothea has smiled all her smiles.

The central question which is raised by such constructions regards the status of the CO with respect to both its syntax and its semantics. That this question is not a new one, nor one confined to theoretical linguistics is seen in Harper’s English Grammar where we read: “Some authorities . . . contend that cognate verbs — verbs which are followed by objects that repeat their meaning — are intransitive. However the verbs in such expressions as He slept a peaceful sleep and He lived a useful life are by the majority of grammarians regarded as transitive verbs” (Opdycke 1941:106).