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The Salishan language Lushootseed has been claimed to lack both syntactic subjects and morphosyntactically transitive clauses, a problematic stance from a universalist/typological point of view. This paper offers evidence both for the syntactic role of subject in Lushootseed and the existence of transitive clauses, and examines the sentence- and discourse-level properties of Lushootseed subjects that make them essential for the grounding of events and discourse in both space and time. Their centrality to the discourse-organization of the language, and hence their recoverability, allows their frequent — and, in transitive clauses, obligatory — elision from the surface form of sentences.