have arrived in a later period. Consonant clusters consisting of a stop followed by a sibilant — themselves arising from vowel epenthesis — are generally contracted to /c/. For example, kec-k ("liver") arose from *keks, which arose from epenthesis and final-vowel deletion processes in *kekesi, which itself is the reduplicated form of *kesi. However, there are words in which the suffix -kš appears, suggesting that this contraction rule ran its course in an earlier period. Syllable structure and stress The typical Atakapa syllable is of the structure CVC. Swanton (1929) observes that clusters of more than two consonants are rare in the language. From his analysis of Gatschet's data, he concludes that consonant clusters of any size are not permitted in the syllable onset, but that they are permitted in the coda. Stress is "a purely mechanical function of phrase rhythm" in Atakapa; it is generally the final syllable of a phrase that receives stress. Morphology The Atakapa language is a mostly agglutinative, somewhat polysynthetic language of the templatic type. This meaning that the language stacks (primarily within the verbal complex) a number of affixes to express locatives, tense, aspect, modality, valency adjustment, and person/number (as both subject and object), which are assembled in a rather specific order. Person marking is one of the only instances of fusion within the language, fusing both person and number. Nouns have only a handful of suffixes and usually take only one suffix at a time. The language is largely head-marking; however, reduplication of an adjectival stem tends to show dependent-marking, as it often expresses the plurality of the noun it describes. shāk tōl "good man" shāk tōltōl "good men" Pronominal morphology Object pronouns are prefixed to verbs, while subject pronouns are suffixed. There are independent forms of each pronoun as well: in the first person singular and plural, this form appears to be distinct from either affix, but in the second and third persons, the affixes seem to be related to the independent forms. Grammatical gender appears not to occur in Atakapa, though evidence for it in nearby languages (e.g. Chitimacha) has been found. The following table of pronominal forms is presented in Swanton (1919). In addition, Swanton notes the existence of a reflexive prefix hat- and a reciprocal prefix hak-. However, the reflexive form may be a circumfix rather than a prefix: Kaufman cites the example of hat-yul-šo ("paint themselves"), in which