This paper makes three claims about the status of roots in the Salish language family, spoken in northwestern North America. The first is that roots in Salish are categorially specified: there is a three-way distinction between nouns, adjectives, and verbs. The second is that all verb roots are unaccusative: they systematically lack an external argument, even when the meaning of the verb root entails an agent. The third is that all verb roots are eventive and culminating: they have the aspectual profile of achievements. These claims cause various problems for putative universals of lexical decomposition. In particular, the first claim challenges the idea that there is an acategorial √ underlying all categorially specified heads; the second counter-exemplifies typological claims concerning limits on the mapping of lexical semantic representations onto argument structure; and the third suggests that roots may vary cross-linguistically in how they realize Aktionsarten, rather than being universally associated with the same aspectual primitives.