This paper is an exploration of root semantics, change-of-state (CS), and state passives in Nsyilxcn (a.k.a. Okanagan, ISO: 639-3 oka), a Southern Interior Salish language spoken in south-central British Columbia, and the northern interior of Washington State. The analysis involves a synthesis of Beavers and Koontz-Garboden’s (2012, 2020) theory of change-of-state, work on state passives (Parsons 1990; Kratzer 2000; Embick 2004) and the syntactic and semantic functions of v (Kratzer 1994; Embick 2004, 2023), expressed within a degree framework (Kennedy 1999; Kennedy and Levin 2008; Nederveen 2023 for Salish). I demonstrate that if roots lack degree standards in Nsyilxcn and scalar target states are inherent arguments of CS roots, systemic predictive generalizations emerge regarding not only the semantics of v structures in Nsyilxcn, but points of variation across Salish can also be meaningfully engaged with. Aside from the primary goal of providing an accurate description and compositional analysis of Nsyilxcn roots as they occur within several key v structures, this paper hopes to contribute an additional cross-linguistic perspective and methodology to the ongoing debate regarding the types of meaning roots encode in natural language (Beavers et al. 2021), and the semantics of v.
