Escape from the noun phrase From relative clause to converb and beyond in an Amazonian language (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Headless relative clauses with a gap: A typological trait of Mesoamerican languages
Linguistic Typology, 2024
This paper has two main goals. One is to introduce a type of "headless" (or "antecedentless") relative clause that presents a gap strategy and that has not been sufficiently discussed in the typological literature. The other is to show that this type of headless relative clause with a gap is a characteristic trait of Mesoamerican languages, since it exists in many languages of the Mesoamerican linguistic area as an important constructional option in their relativization syntax, independently of the genetic relationships of the language in question. Two types of headless relative clauses are well known to date: one involving a relativization strategy with a relative pronoun (e.g., I wore what you asked me to wear) and another with a light head, introduced by Citko (2004), somewhat comparable to I wore the one that you asked me to wear. The third type of headless relative clause discussed here presents a gap (i.e., there is no manifestation of the relativized term in the relative clause). It would be equivalent to saying 'I wore you asked me to wear'. The phenomenon we study here is interesting both from a typological and areal point of view.
Clause-internal correlatives in Southeastern Mande: A case for the propagation of typological rara
This paper discusses a typologically unusual relativization strategy attested in several Southeastern Mande languages. In this construction, the relativized noun phrase appears in its own non-reduced clause and is referred to by a pronoun in the main clause, as in constructions with correlative clauses (literally, “That man invited us, I am writing to him” for ‘I am writing to the man who invited us’). Unlike in typical cases of correlative clauses, however, the clause containing the relativized noun phrase appears inside the main clause, immediately preceding the resumptive pronoun (literally, “I am writing – that man invited us – to him”). I discuss the syntactic properties of this unusual construction and suggest a possible diachronic path for its development. In particular, I argue that the rise of clause-internal correlatives in Southeastern Mande is licensed by a typologically unusual syntactic property of those languages: clause-internal extraposition of noun phrases, which is in turn related to the clause-level adjunction of postpositional phrases. More generally, besides adding a previously unattested type to the typology of relativization strategies, I seek to illustrate how typologically unusual morphosyntactic properties provide the basis for the subsequent development of rare or unique constructions (the “Propagation of Rara” principle).
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.
Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican Languages
2021
This volume presents the collective work of a team of twenty-one scholars who have investigated headless relative clauses in fifteen languages from five language families—all Mesoamerican but one. Headless relative clauses have received little attention in the linguistic literature, despite the many morpho-syntactic and semantic puzzles they raise within and across languages and for our understanding of human language in general. Headless relative clauses have been even more neglected in the study of Mesoamerican languages. This volume constitutes the first in-depth, systematic study of headless relative clauses for any Mesoamerican languages we know of, and the broadest and most articulated crosslinguistic study of headless relative clauses that has been conducted so far. For most of the languages in this volume, there is no descriptive or documentary material on wh-constructions in general, let alone headless relative clauses. Many of the languages are threatened or endangered; al...