Iconicity of syntax and narrative in Amerindian prosaic texts (original) (raw)
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Conventions and Linguistic Tropes in Olmec Art and Writing
Dialogue of Four Pristine Writing Systems, 2019
I n this study, we examine the iconographic and textual systems in use among the late Early-and Middle-Formative period visual cultures ofMesoamerica, with a specific focus on the Olmec culture of Mexico's Gulf coast. Our analysis centers on the conventions of art and writing, as well as sign groupings that suggests verbal tropes, such as couplets and kennings, common to many Mesoamerican languages. As we have argued in a recent article/ by looking to formal conventions and literary tropes, we draw a distinction between a visual system, wherein the relationship among iconic signs and other pictorial elements is iconographic, and a system that is iconic on the level of the individual sign, but linguistic on the level of the relationship among those signs (i.e., the relationship is abstract and does attempt to reproduce real space). For example, in this first instance, a throne may appear beneath the person who sits on it. That is an iconographic relationship between signs based on a pictorial mode of communication. But in the system that is found on a number of Formative period examples, the relationship between iconic signs is based on principles other than the compositional canons typically found in Olmec art.2 In these cases, a linguistic structure-evidenced by distinct formal conventions and the presence of literary tropes-underlies the relationship between signs. It is at this moment that many of the most enduring conventions ofMesoamerican writing systems were established.
Defying the Norm of the Constituent Order: A Study of Bakairi, a Southern Amazonian Language
Lingua, 2014
Since the 1960s, a linguistic assumption has been widely held that once the ‘basic’ constituent order of the subject and object in relation to the verb is identified and combined with other factors (such as syntactic alignment and verb inflection), it is possible to typologize a given language. This idea became widely held with the work of Joseph Greenberg (1963), when numerous scholars joined this research field to create what is known today as the Greenbergian typology. Of the six possible permutations of the A1 & O & V, Greenberg found that only three core constituent orders of the verbal arguments were predominant in the world’s languages: AOV, AVO and VAO.2 Until 1975, it was believed that the norm for the world’s languages fell into one of these three abovementioned ‘implicational universals,’ few languages employed OAV and VOA, and no language with the basic constituent order of OVA existed in the world. Derbyshire (1979) together with Geoffrey Pullum (Derbyshire 1981) challenged this assertion. For over a decade since the early 1960s, Derbyshire had carefully studied Hixkaryana, a Carib language that defied these implicational universals. His study became the first documentation of an OVA language and it demonstrated that one of the benefits of investigating small or endangered languages was the discovery of previously unknown linguistic phenomena. This paper hereby will shed some light on another language that is also object-initial and agent/subject-final, the Bakairi language, one of the five Cariban languages with the OVA linearization in the Amazon River basin.
A typology of frustrative marking in Amazonian languages
This chapter describes the grammatical category labelled ‘frustrative’, which is common in Amazonian languages but little-known outside that area. On the basis of a survey of Amazonian languages, it proposes a cross-linguistically applicable definition of frustrative as a marker of unfulfilled expectation. This definition differs from those offered by previous analysts as it does not make reference to any evaluative component. A description of the extended uses of frustrative includes negative evaluation, aspectual senses, and discourse organisation functions. The final sections present the evidence for frustrative marking as an areal feature of Amazonian languages, addressing the diachronic development of frustrative markers and evidence for diffusion of the category through language contact.
Competing iconicities in the structure of languages
Cognitive Linguistics, 2013
The paper examines the role that iconicity plays in the structuring of grammars. Two main points are argued for: (a) Grammar does not necessarily suppress iconicity; rather, iconicity and grammar can enjoy a congenial relation in that iconicity can play an active role in the structuring of grammars. (b) Iconicity is not monolithic. There are different types of iconicity and languages take advantage of the possibilities afforded by them. We examine the interaction between iconicity and grammar by focusing on the ways in which sign languages employ the physical body of the signer as a rich iconic resource for encoding a variety of grammatical notions. We show that the body can play three different roles in iconic forms in sign languages: it can be used as a naming device where body parts represent body parts; it can represent the subject argument of verbal signs, and it can stand for first person. These strategies interact and sometimes compete in the languages under study. Each langu...
Iconicity as the motivation for the signification and locality of deictic grammatical tones in Tal
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics , 2024
We present novel evidence for iconicity in core morphophonological grammar by documenting, describing, and analysing two patterns of tonal alternation in Tal (West Chadic, Nigeria). When a non-proximal deixis modifies a noun in Tal, every tone of the modified noun is lowered. When the nominal modifier is a proximal deixis, the final tone of the modified noun is raised. The tone lowering and raising are considered the effects of non-proximal and proximal linkers, which have the tone features [–Upper, –Raised] and [+Raised] as their respective exponents. The realisation and maximal extension of the non-proximal tone features are considered effects of morpheme-specific featural correspondence constraints. Similarly, the exponent of the proximal linker docking on the final TBU is due to the relative ranking of the proximal-specific correspondence constraints. The association of the tone features [–Upper, –Raised] and [+Raised] with non-proximal and proximal linkers, respectively, is in line with crosslinguistic patterns of magnitude iconicity. Given that the local and long-distance realisations of the proximal and non-proximal featural affixes respectively are perceptually similar to deictic gestures, the locality of the featural affixation is considered a novel pattern of iconicity. To motivate this pattern of iconicity, we extend the notion of perceptual motivation in linguistic theory to include the crossmodal depiction of sensory imagery. Consequently, Tal presents evidence for iconicity as a motivation for morphophonological grammar.
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IJAL, 2017
This paper discusses objecthood in Kakataibo (Panoan, Peru) by studying three different types of non-subject arguments in the language: objects of transitive predicates, quasi-objects, and oblique objects. Quasi-objects are similar to objects because of their lack of overt case marking, but they appear with intransitive predicates. Oblique objects also appear with some intransitive predicates but differ from objects and quasi-objects by carrying an indirect locative marker. Only objects of transitive predicates can control important object-based syntactic operations, such as object agreement and object switch-reference, but objects, quasi-objects, and oblique objects can be reflexivized and recipro-calized. Adjuncts in Kakataibo cannot undergo either reflexivization or reciprocalization, and they are always morphologically marked. It is argued here that the existence of three different non-subject arguments in Kakataibo produces a continuum-like effect in the distinction between objects and adjuncts, and it reveals that objecthood in the language needs to be understood as a gradient and variable category.