No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
A Grammar of Alto Perené (Arawak)
... Shipibo is a language of the Panoan family with an ergative/absolutive alignment in the nominal and pronominal systems. Shipibo does not mark gender on its pronominal elements (Valenzuela, 2010).1 Ashaninka is a language of the Arawakan family with a split-mayer and sánchez intransitive case system (Reed & Payne, 1986;Mihas, 2015).2 Unlike Shipibo, Ashaninka exhibits morphological gender marking on verbal object agreement markers. ...
... In transitive clauses, both arguments in the main clause require obligatory agreement on the verb, following nominative-accusative alignment. As shown in the transitive example (11), the A argument (transitive subject) is a prefix on the verb, and the O argument (transitive object) an affix (Mihas, 2015). Transitive object markers are suffixes marked for person and gender (-ri masculine, -ro non-masculine).5 ...
... While Shipibo lacks an overt thirdperson morpheme with some form of absolutive marking, Ashaninka has an overt suffix, and Spanish has syntactic proclitics and enclitics. Concerning features, while pronominal forms in Shipibo are marked for person and number but not for gender (Valenzuela, 2003(Valenzuela, , 2010, Ashaninka (Mihas, 2015) and Spanish forms are marked for person, gender and number. Typologically, while Spanish has a nominative-accusative alignment in its pronominal system, Shipibo has an ergative-absolutive alignment, and Ashaninka has a nominativeaccusative alignment with split or fluid transitivity (Mihas, 2015). ...
... El pronombre le puede anteceder nombre femeninos o masculinos tanto en hablantes nativos de español como en hablantes bilingües en la región amazónica de Junín. Las autoras indican que si bien el asháninka posee género en su gramática, el género no se expresa necesariamente en los objetos a diferencia del español (Mihas 2015, Sánchez y Mayer 2018. Creo que es importante destacar que las autoras ofrecen ejemplos concretos en la lengua asháninka de Mihas (2015: 200) que permiten contrastar el fenómeno y la flexibilidad en la lengua asháninka para usar marcadores con o sin género, como en los ejemplos (10) y (11): 10) iro p-ak-e-na-ro 3.nm.top ...
... El sujeto puede ser nulo y presenta género en el sistema pronominal; sin embargo, no requiere concordancia en la construcción de frases nominales. La lengua asháninka, por su parte, es de la familia lingüística arawak (Aikhenvald 2012, Mihas 2010, 2015 Actualidad y futuro del pensamiento de Eugenio Coseriu ...
1. INTRODUCCIÓN El español del Perú subsume distintas variedades lingüísticas. Cada una de es-tas formas de habla recoge una serie de diversos rasgos o características iden-tificados y formalizados por los lingüistas. Esto ha llevado a queen diversas ocasiones (Marticorena, 2010; Ramírez, 2003)-se haya tratado de englobar amplias regiones geográficas, que corresponden a variedades secundarias de acuerdo con la dialectología coseriana (Coseriu, 1980a). Es importante notar que, dadas las diferencias geográficas e históricas del Perú, el contacto entre las lenguas indígenas con el español ha sido diferente en el espacio andino en comparación con la Amazonía peruana. De acuerdo con Emlen (2016), los Andes se caracterizan por un fuerte bi-lingüismo entre el español y el quechua, o el español con el aimara (Emlen, 2016). La condición de dominación desde la Conquista fue relevante para que la relación diglósica genere un bilingüismo transicional entre la lengua an-dina y el español (Cerrón-Palomino, 2000). En otras palabras, en el territorio andino en algún momento fue importante que uno aprenda español y deje de hablar el quechua o el aimara. El contacto entre estas dos lenguas de distinta ti-pología se ve reflejado en el español andino. El contacto entre esta variedad de español y las variedades costeñas es, además, intensa por las fuertes migracio-nes y la consolidación de redes.
... Los estudios morfológicos realizados en lengua asháninka por Payne (1981), Payne, Payne y Sanchez Santos (1982), García 30 Para una descripción elemental de la gramática asháninka, véase Mihas (2010Mihas ( , 2015 Salazar (1993), Payne (1999), García Rivera (2007) y Mihas (2010Mihas ( , 2015 mencionan que el asháninka es una lengua aglutinante y que existen dos tipos de palabras en esta lengua: palabras con raíz nominal y palabras con raíz verbal. Según Payne: ...
... Los estudios morfológicos realizados en lengua asháninka por Payne (1981), Payne, Payne y Sanchez Santos (1982), García 30 Para una descripción elemental de la gramática asháninka, véase Mihas (2010Mihas ( , 2015 Salazar (1993), Payne (1999), García Rivera (2007) y Mihas (2010Mihas ( , 2015 mencionan que el asháninka es una lengua aglutinante y que existen dos tipos de palabras en esta lengua: palabras con raíz nominal y palabras con raíz verbal. Según Payne: ...
Desde el año 2012, el Registro Nacional de Identificación y Estado Civil viene investigando y publicando la colección de "Tesoros de Nombres Indígenas", en los cuales identifica las estrategias y motivos que usan los padres para elegir el nombre de sus hijos en diferentes pueblos indígenas del Perú. Hasta hoy, ha publicado los Tesoros de nombres quechuas de Apurímac, awajún, jaqaru, matsés, wampis, aimaras y shipibo-konibo.
Su objetivo es promover el uso de los nombres indígenas, así como su correcta escritura en los registros civiles. Esto permitirá preservar la antroponimia de los pueblos originarios y, además, ejercer diversos derechos como los lingüísticos, culturales y
aquellos relacionados con el fortalecimiento de la ciudadanía.
En esta oportunidad, presentamos el Tesoro de Nombres Asháninkas, el octavo de nuestra colección, el cual nos introduce en la historia, la lengua y la antroponimia de este pueblo. Se presentan las listas de los bajirontisanori (nombres verdaderos)
para su elección, a fin de otorgárselos a los hombres y mujeres pertenecientes a este pueblo originario de nuestra Amazonía. Finalmente, esta investigación es un esfuerzo del Reniec para promover y enfatizar el acceso de los pueblos indígenas al derecho al nombre y a la identidad, así como para reconocer y fortalecer una ciudadanía intercultural en constante proceso de cambio. En esa perspectiva, presentamos este libro que aporta a la construcción de un Perú diverso e identificado desde su registro oficial ad portas
del Bicentenario de la Independencia de la República.
... The overlap may not be complete, however, and typically involves restrictions on nonverbal predicates relative to verbal predicates. For Alto Perené, for example, Mihas (2015) describes a restricted range of verbal morphology available to nominal predicates: "Noun-derived predicates exhibit a limited use of verbal derivational and inflectional morphology … Nouns do not occur as predicate heads in the imperative mood or apprehensive modal construction" (Mihas 2015: 116-117). Movima shows no distinction between verbal and nominal predicates in most contexts (compare Examples 6, with a verbal predicate, and 7, with a nominal predicate), but the word class distinction is apparent in embedded (i.e. ...
... As has already been mentioned, even the most verbal-clause-like constructions are not completely identical to verbal clauses. They may show a restricted range of verbal morphology, as in Alto Perené (Mihas 2015), or they may be restricted to certain clause types or TAM configurations. These restrictions generally motivate against an analysis whereby the predicate is a derived verb. ...
This volume explores typological variation within nonverbal predication in Amazonian languages. Using abundant data, generally from original and extensive fieldwork on under-described languages, it presents a far more detailed picture of nonverbal predication constructions than previously published grammatical descriptions. On the one hand, it addresses the fact that current typologies of nonverbal predication are less developed than those of verbal predication; on the other, it provides a wealth of new data and analyses of Amazonian languages, which are still poorly represented in existing typologies. Several contributions offer historical insights, either reconstructing the sources of innovative nonverbal predicate constructions, or describing diachronic pathways by which constructions used for nonverbal predication spread to other functions in the grammar. The introduction provides a modern typological overview, and also proposes a new diachronic typology to explain how distinct types of nonverbal predication arise.
... Un caso interesante es el de la lengua ashéninka del alto Perené en Junín. La lingüista Elena Mihas (2015) logró reunir un inventario de nominalizadores relativamente diverso. En principio, ella separa los nominalizadores entre agentivos y no agentivos. ...
Un hallazgo interesante es la presencia de topónimos recurrentes en los Andes del sur peruano que terminan en lli / lle, muchos de ellos concentrados en el sur de Cuzco y norte de Arequipa, cuna ancestral de los chumbivilcas y collagas. En atención a su carácter de cierre de elemento léxico, es indudable que se trata de un sufijo nominalizador con la forma *-lli /-ʎi/. El análisis presentado aquí ha revelado una gran productividad morfológica de *-lli, que se aplicaba tanto a nombres como verbos produciendo topónimos con los sentidos de ‘lugar’, ‘abundancia’ y ‘cualidad’. Así también, su homología formal y en parte semántica con el agentivo deverbativo aimara -ri apunta hacia un origen en común. No obstante, la multifuncionalidad y no selectividad de *-lli está muy por encima del comportamiento de los nominalizadores modernos del aimara que son regularmente selectivos. Respecto a la lengua que lo empleaba, se ha establecido, a partir de la presencia de *-lli sufijando mayormente a raíces aimara y quechua, un vínculo genético con el (proto)aimara de Vilcas. Asimismo, el patrón de la huella densa de los topónimos con epicentro en la cuenca alta y media del río Velille refleja la presencia de un grupo idiomático homogéneo, que coexistió muy probablemente con un dialecto puquina. Esta consideración reclama más estudios sobre el rol y la presencia puquina en la región para probar no solo el influjo fonético puquina /ɾ/ > [ʎ], sino también un efecto de superestrato.
... However, the deeper differences explained here help to understand the results presented in Section 6. In this section, we provide an in-depth analysis of both languages based on previous work (Cerrón-Palomino, 1987;Mihas, 2015). The comparative analysis of the two language's grammatical makeup and morphology, to our knowledge, has not been taken into account by other research, specifically for machine translation. ...
Low-resource languages sometimes take on similar morphological and syntactic characteristics due to their geographic nearness and shared history. Two low-resource neighboring languages found in Peru, Quechua and Ashaninka, can be considered, at first glance, two languages that are morphologically similar. In order to translate the two languages, various approaches have been taken. For Quechua, neural machine transfer-learning has been used along with byte-pair encoding. For Ashaninka, the language of the two with fewer resources, a finite-state transducer is used to transform Ashaninka texts and its dialects for machine translation use. We evaluate and compare two approaches by attempting to use newly-formed Ashaninka corpora for neural machine translation. Our experiments show that combining the two neighboring languages, while similar in morphology, word sharing, and geographical location, improves Ashaninka-Spanish translation but degrades Quechua-Spanish translations.
... In a number of Kampa languages (S3), the non-specified possessor marker has the form -ntsi or -tsi. Mihas (2015Mihas ( :334-9, 2017a:790-1) Weber 1980) appears to use the non-specified possessor suffix -e/he with body parts, e.g. heten e-he 'ear', enene-h e 'tongue', en a-he 'bone', and the suffix -ti in at least one instance, nis ısa-tĩ 'louse' (from Proto-Arawak *nih, Payne 1991:411). ...
In most Arawak languages, obligatorily possessed nouns are bound forms. They have to be accompanied by a possessor. If the possessor is unknown or irrelevant, the noun will take the non‐specified possessor suffix. A suffix of the same segmental form occurs in deverbal nominalizations with unspecified arguments, or as a nominalizer on verbs. We hypothesise that the non‐specified possessor suffix was originally a feature of obligatorily possessed nouns denoting body parts and a selection of culturally important items (including ‘house’) but not kinship terms. The common Arawak polysemy of a non‐specified possessor marker and a nominalizer, reconstructible for the proto‐language, appears to be cross‐linguistically rare.
... 2015: 222). Such traits usually define specifil subregions of the Guapore-Mamore area, while at the same time they may extend beyond the Guapore-Mamore area (see also Van Gijn 2014, 2015. ...
Issues in multilingualism and its implications for communities and society at large, language acquisition and use, language diversification, and creative language use associated with new linguistic identities have become hot topics in both scientific and popular debates. A ubiquitous aspect of multilingualism is language contact. This book contains twelve articles that discuss specific aspects of Contact Linguistics. These articles cover a wide range of topics in the field, including creoles, areal linguistics, language mixing, and the sociolinguistic aspects of interactions with audiences. The book is dedicated to Pieter Muysken whose work on pidgin and creole languages, mixed languages, code-switching, bilingualism, and areal linguistics has been ground-breaking and inspirational for the authors in this book, as well as numerous other scholars working on the various facets of this rapidly expanding field.
... Matsigenka is head-marking with a rich polysynthetic structure, and it uses verbal suffixes and enclitics, as well as a few prefixes and proclitics, for most of its grammatical functions. For more on the typological profile of the Kampan languages, see Michael (2008) and Mihas (2015). This chapter also discusses Andean Spanish, a set of contact varieties spoken by millions of people across Western South America. ...
... There are 144 extracts comprising 5 to 34 lines of conversation explained with reference to the functions they are argued to serve. The language's fundamental reference grammar (Mihas, 2015) is also cited many times in the book Williams reviewed (Mihas, 2017). In addition, I included citations to my directly related work on non-verbal communication patterns (Mihas, 2013, cited Mihas, 2017, and epistemics (Mihas, 2016, cited Mihas, 2017. ...
... We conclude this section by briefly mentioning an illusory case of Construction A to be found in some Arawak languages, such as Alto Perené (Ashéninka; see Mihas 2015) and Tariana (Aikhenvald 2003). In these languages, any major word class element may carry a selection of the TAM markers typically found on verbs, as in: These affixes, however, are not person markers; furthermore, and crucially, they are 'floating clitics' which may land on any syntactic component, irrespective of whether it fulfills the predicative function (see Aikhenvald 2002: 45-47, who also quotes a similar example from Kannada, Dravidic). ...
The morphological expression of non-verbal predication is a geographically widespread, although not very frequent, typological feature. This paper highlights the existence of two radically contrasting types of non-verbal predicative inflection. Construction A has already been described in the literature. It consists of attaching person-sensitive inflection markers to non-verbal predicates, possibly extending this treatment to adverbs and adverbial phrases (locational and temporal), pronouns and quantifiers. This type is well attested in Uralic, Turkic, and Paleosiberian, as well as in some Amazonian language families (most notably Chicham), but it has also been pointed out for some sparse languages of Oceania and Africa. Such non-verbal person inflections diachronically stem from incorporation of conjugated copula elements. Construction B, by contrast, is much rarer and is described here for the first time. It also consists of a dedicated morphological form of the non-verbal predicate (limited, however, to nouns and adjectives), but such form stands out as morphologically lighter than any other form to be found in nouns or adjectives in argument or attribute position. While the latter forms carry some kind of case marker, the noun/adjective predicate merely consists (or historically did) of the word’s root. This type of construction can be found in the small Zamucoan family and still survives in some Tupí-Guaraní languages. Diachronic inspection of Semitic indicates, however, that this predicative strategy was possibly adopted in some ancient varieties, although at later stages it intertwined with the expression of referential specificity. The paper compares the two construction types, highlighting similarities and differences.
... Matsigenka is head-marking with a rich polysynthetic structure, and it uses verbal suffixes and enclitics, as well as a few prefixes and proclitics, for most of its grammatical functions. For more on the typological profile of the Kampan languages, see Michael (2008) and Mihas (2015). This chapter also discusses Andean Spanish, a set of contact varieties spoken by millions of people across Western South America. ...
In a small community in the Andean-Amazonian transitional zone of Southern Peru, speakers of Matsigenka use recapitulative linkages in myth narrations. These constructions establish a kind of rhythm, distinctive to the myth narration dis- course genre, through which the events of the narrative unfold, information is introduced and elaborated, and suspense and surprise are achieved. This chapter describes the structural and discursive properties of these linking devices and their use in myth narrations. Bridging clauses generally recapitulate reference clauses verbatim or with minor modifications, and are usually linked to discourse-new information as simple juxtaposed clauses (though there is much variation in the structure and pragmatic functions of these constructions). Though the constructions contribute to discourse cohesion, their function is primarily poetic in nature. Furthermore, when Matsigenka speakers narrate the same myths in Spanish and in mixed Matsigenka-Spanish speech, they use the same kinds of linking construc- tions (which are otherwise uncommon in Spanish). Thus, the transfer of this kind of pattern from Matsigenka to Spanish is regimented by discourse genre, and offers an illustration of the cultural (i.e., metapragmatic) mediation of language contact.
... Many verbs and nouns constitute linear strings of segmentable affixes, typically assigned to particular slots. The verb plays a key role in Alto Perené grammar (see Mihas, 2015 for details). In talk, turns are often expressed by verbs in clausal function. ...
Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in lowland Peru, this study examines linguistic resources used for coding agreements in Alto Perené (Arawak) conversation. The study draws on the anthropological tradition of conversation analysis-informed ethnographies. The investigation of agreeing responses is limited to those which allow a projectedly ‘knowing’, or K-plus, participant to raise his or her epistemic status from the sequentially second position. It is shown that Alto Perené K-plus response formats include the evaluative property word kametsari ‘good’ with an intensifier and/or upgraded prosody, argument focus structures, two polarity verbs ari ‘it is the case’ and omapero ‘it is true’, and the verb ñakiro ‘as you can see’. This analysis demonstrates a relationship between the Alto Perené practices of expressing K-plus agreements and the collateral effects arising from the particular meanings and functions of structures which are used for accomplishing an agreeing action.
... The ri-and ro-nominalizations are semantically underspecified in that they cover a range of semantic roles, such as agentive, patientive, instrument, and place. Conventionalized nominalizations take the marker of plural number -paye, demonstrative-locative enclitics =ka 'proximal', =ra 'medial', =nta 'distal', and can be modified by demonstratives, numerals, and adjectives, the latter illustrated in (7) (for details and more examples, see Mihas 2015). In (7), the place nominalization refers to the part of the house where the speaker's family has meals. ...
Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of landscape terms in an Amazonian Arawak language of Peru, this study examines landscape categorization among the Alto Perené Kampa. It is shown that Alto Perené culture-specific themes of ecological categorization, namely substance and shape, form a covert template of semantic generalizations that structure the landscape vocabulary set. The continuous semantic strands of landscape terms are substance and shape of geomorphic features, either expressed by simplex terms or combinations of simplex terms with various classifiers. The comprehensive hydrological and topographic vocabulary is argued to reflect Alto Perené Arawaks’ particular concern with the affordances of the surrounding landscape and their spiritual preoccupations.
El objetivo de este artículo es la caracterización de las manifestaciones lexicales y gramaticales de la corporalidad en las lenguas arawak. Consideramos que la noción de corporalidad en estas lenguas es central por la expresión de la persona y de la pacientividad; en otras palabras, un estado o calidad que tiene las características típicas del paciente. Este artículo empieza con una reflexión lexical sobre la cuestión de inalienabilidad de las partes del cuerpo, su nomenclatura –especialmente sobre la creación lexical– y la fuente de las emociones, como la palabra terena okóvo "guata" pero también "alma", o el wayuu -a’ain "corazón, alma" o el tariana -kale "corazón, mente, fuerza vital, alma, soplo". Estos ejemplos muestran que el cuerpo es el centro de sensaciones físicas, fisiológicas y hasta psicológicas. Las evidencias de esta afirmación aparecen a través de construcciones específicas para verbos estativos, como la oposición entre marcado del sujeto y marcado del objeto, o la existencia del marcado diferencial del sujeto. Estas diferentes construcciones permiten al hablante expresar especificaciones y sutilidades sobre las sensaciones ya mencionadas.
It has been shown that linguistic features of main and dependent clauses in complex sentence constructions may show different degrees of association strength giving rise to a number of cross-clausal associations. While this domain has been explored for the most part in corpus-based studies in individual languages, it has received little attention from a typological perspective. The present study makes inroads into this territory by exploring cross-clausal associations of one complex sentence construction in typological perspective: Counterfactual conditionals (e.g., if you had gone, you would have seen her ). In particular, special attention is paid to the interaction of clause-linkage patterns, TAM markers, iconicity of sequence, and ‘but’ clauses in counterfactual conditionals in a sample of 131 languages. By using a hierarchical configural frequency analysis, we identify a number of preferred and dispreferred cross-clausal associations in counterfactual conditionals that we explain from a functional perspective.
In earlier research, the sociative causative has been considered a subcategory of a prototypical causative and not a category of its own. In the sociative causative the causer both initiates the event and participates in it, unlike in the prototypical causative in which the causer is only the initiator. It has been proposed that the causer can participate in the event either by acting together with the causee, helping the causee, or supervising the causee. The sociative causative can be marked on the predicate by using a specific sociative causative marker or it can be a reading of a prototypical causative construction or a reading of an applicative. It has been proposed in the previous literature that the sociative causative is an areal feature of the South American indigenous languages, and 26 languages were previously known to have sociative causative. In addition to these 26 languages, a genealogically balanced sampling method was applied and four more languages with sociative causative function were found. The 30 languages were analyzed formally and semantically. The analysis shows that the sociative causative usually describes the type of causation in which the causer is a co-actor with the causee or the causer helps the causee. The supervision type of sociative causation, however, occurred rarely. The sociative causative tends to be used with intransitive verbs that express motion or physical activity.
Studies on individual Amazonian languages have shown that these languages can contribute to informing and refining our theories of counterfactual conditional constructions. Still missing, however, is an attempt at exploring this complex sentence construction across different genetic units of the Amazonia in a single study. The paper explores counterfactual conditionals in a sample of 24 Amazonian languages. Special attention is paid to the range of TAM markers and clause-linking devices used in counterfactual conditionals in the Amazonian languages in the sample. As for TAM markers, it is shown that protases tend to be unmarked (they do not occur with any TAM values), and apodoses tend to occur with irrealis or frustrative marking. As for clause-linking devices, it is shown that most Amazonian languages in the sample contain counterfactual conditionals occurring with non-specialized clause-linking devices. This means that the distinction between counterfactual conditionals and other types of conditionals (e.g., real/generic) is not grammaticalized in clause-linking devices. Instead, the counterfactual conditional meaning resides in the combination of specific TAM markers. The paper also pays close attention to the distribution of TAM markers and clause-linking devices in counterfactual conditional constructions in the Vaupés. In particular, special attention is paid to how Tariana counterfactual conditional construction have been shaped by Tucanoan languages through language contact.
In this communication, I focus on Shawi forms of address used in Peruvian State posters during the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic took a heavy toll on the Peruvian Indigenous population. A recent study showed that Indigenous people had 3.18 times the risk of infection and 0.4 times the mortality risk of the general population in Peru. The Shawi have not been included among the most heavily affected. A preliminary descriptive and critical account of Peruvian State posters whereby languages such as Shawi and other Peruvian Indigenous languages (Awajun, Ashaninka, different varieties of Quechua, Shipibo, etc.) have been used to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is provided. Shawi seems to be the only language of the sample where information has been framed using first-person inclusive forms. This appears to have led to enhanced communal engagement in the suggested health-related practices. Additionally, opinions on the issue from local stakeholders are briefly discussed. While the results are derived solely from preliminary observations, my findings could serve as a basis for enhancing health communication strategies in other Indigenous contexts, utilizing linguistically informed intercultural approaches.
Large-scale typological work on negation has so far ignored negation in adverbial clause-linkage. The present work makes inroads into this territory by analyzing the world-wide cross-linguistic variation in the expression of negation in precedence clauses (e.g. ‘before he arrived, we had already gone home’) in a variety sample of 155 languages. The research demonstrates that even when languages employ a clause-linking marker for conveying temporal precedence, negative markers may play an important role in that they may be obligatory, optional, or forbidden in the precedence clause. It is proposed that whether the clause-linking marker is semantically monofunctional or polyfunctional is the key to this puzzle. As for precedence clauses containing polyfunctional clause-linking markers and negative markers, it is shown that negation must not be considered expletive. With respect to precedence clauses occurring with monofunctional markers, it is proposed that the precedence clause tends not to license a negative marker. Moreover, it is shown that optional negative markers in precedence clauses may have an evaluative sense, which reflects the epistemic stance of the speaker. The paper also explores whether the analysis of precedence clauses put forward in the present research can be generalized to other adverbial clause-linkage constructions: negative concomitance clauses (e.g. ‘I cooked the soup without stirring it even once’).
This paper is the first survey of verbal affixes encoding the day period (‘at night’,‘in the morning’ etc.) or the yearly seasons (‘in winter’ etc.) when the action takes place. It introduces the term ‘periodic tense’ to refer to this comparative concept, explores the attested paradigms, their interactions with other verbal categories (including the more usual deictic tense), and investigates their diachronic origins. It shows that periodic tense markers are not restricted to incorporated nouns of time period but constitute a highly grammaticalized verbal category in some languages, which can redundantly co-occur with free adverbs or nouns indicating time.
The volume deals with the multifaceted nature of morphological complexity understood as a composite rather than unitary phenomenon as it shows an amazing degree of crosslinguistic variation. It features an Introduction by the editors that critically discusses some of the foundational assumptions informing contemporary views on morphological complexity, eleven chapters authored by an excellent set of contributors, and a concluding chapter by Östen Dahl that reviews various approaches to morphological complexity addressed in the preceding contributions and focuses on the minimum description length approach. The central eleven chapters approach morphological complexity from different perspectives, including the language-particular, the crosslinguistic, and the acquisitional one, and offer insights into issues such as the quantification of morphological complexity, its syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic aspects, diachronic developments including the emergence and acquisition of complexity, and the relations between morphological complexity and socioecological parameters of language. The empirical evidence includes data from both better-known languages such as Russian, and lesser-known and underdescribed languages from Africa, Australia, and the Americas, as well as experimental data drawn from iterated artificial language learning.
It is now clear that languages not-genetically related can come to share syntactic structures that were not necessarily borrowed directly in their modern forms. Although it can be challenging to spot these structures, striking similarities in certain patterns and in fine details of usage may shed light on this process. Not only may spotting the patterns be a difficult task, but also establishing the source of diffusion of a trait (i.e., who passed it to whom). These points are illustrated here with constructions termed ‘adverbial clauses’. Examples are drawn from Mixtec languages. The analysis focuses on six types of adverbial clauses. In particular, it is explained how several Mixtec adverbial clause-linking strategies may have spread to Huasteca Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan) and vice versa.
This investigation offers an analysis of the variation in the expression of purpose relations in a sample of 49 Amazonian languages. The most common strategies are conjunctions and converbs. Interestingly, in a number of Amazonian languages, positive purpose meanings are expressed with a conjunction or a converb in combination with other morphosyntactic properties. We briefly examine the areality of positive purpose clause-linkage patterns in four contact zones in the Amazonia: the Vaupés region, the Caquetá-Putumayo region, the Southern Guiana region, and the Marañon-Huallaga region. Besides analyzing the range of ways by which positive purpose clauses are realized in the sample, we also investigate avertive clauses in a number of languages of the database. Amazonian languages show an interesting typological picture in that they tend to have avertive markers which may be intraclausal or relational.
Diminutives are typically nouns. However, verbs can also be diminutivised, i.e. marked for reduced intensity, duration, seriousness or success of the action or event. This paper is a first attempt at a typology of verbal diminutives, based on a balanced sample of 248 languages. We discuss the analytical and terminological challenges that arise from the study of a category that is not widely recognised and does not have an established place in grammatical descriptions. Our sample shows that verbal diminutives occur across the world, with a slightly higher predominance in the Americas and somewhat fewer cases in Africa. Among the language families, Austronesian has the highest percentage of verbal diminutives in our sample. We present our results for the various formal exponents of verbal diminution on the one hand and the array of semantic effects on the other. Meanings are separated into three categories: attenuation in quantity, attenuation in quality and affective meanings. In many cases, markers of verbal diminution encode additional meanings, some of which contradict the core meaning of attenuation by expressing intensity, durativity or iteration. Such apparent paradoxes have parallels in nominal diminutives. The paper closes with recommendations for further research.
We provide a discussion of some of the challenges in using statistical methods to investigate the morphology-syntax distinction cross-linguistically. The paper is structured around three problems related to the morphology-syntax distinction: (i) the boundary strength problem; (ii) the composition problem; (iii) the architectural problem. The boundary strength problem refers to the possibility that languages vary in terms of how distinct morphology and syntax are or the degree to which morphology is autonomous. The composition problem refers to the possibility that languages vary in terms of how they distinguish morphology and syntax: what types of properties distinguish the two systems. The architecture problem refers to the possibility that languages vary in terms of whether a global distinction between morphology and syntax is motivated at all and the possibility that languages might partition phenomena in different ways. This paper is concerned with providing an overarching review of the methodological problems involved in addressing these three issues. We illustrate the problems using three statistical methods: correlation matrices, random forests with different choices for the dependent variable, and hierarchical clustering with validation techniques.
In this chapter we explore the expression of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in monolingual and bilingual Spanish in contact with typologically different languages. We focus on how DOM patterns are expressed in bilingual and monolingual clitic doubling and dislocated structures by investigating the effect of typological differences in case marking and the effects of definiteness, animacy and thematic role. Our findings show that while definiteness, animacy and thematic structure are relevant factors in the production of DOM across bilingual groups, there are also differences in DOM frequency related to typological distinctions in the L1 of the bilingual groups. Finally, our findings also show variability in the monolingual data of three individuals raised in a contact situation as well as the raise of topicality as a possible factor that contributes to DOM in the L2 varieties under study.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461445618817961e
This paper applies the comparative method to unravel the historical development of the segmental phonology of Paunaka, an Arawakan language of Bolivia. Although the Paunaka vowel system features a single back rounded vowel, it is rather simple to show that it derives from a system with two back rounded qualities *u and *o, but that the former segment shifted to a high central unrounded vowel ɨ. The language has lost *r unconditionally, implying that Paunaka items with r are probable loanwords. Paunaka underewent a spirantization of *ts, thus merging this affricate with the fricative *s. Although Paunaka shares a coronalization of *k > s with Proto-Mojeño, most of the phonological developments that affected Paunaka are either recurrent in the Arawakan language family or only superficially similar to developments in related languages, and thus provide little weight as evidence for subgrouping. An Appendix is also included, with 105 etymologies matching Paunaka lexical and grammatical morphemes with their cognates in Proto-Mojeño, the two extant Mojeño dialects (Ignaciano and Trinitario) and Terena.
The paper investigates the inventory of nominalizing forms and examines restrictions on the morphosyntactic behavior of lexical and clausal nominalizations in Alto Perené (also called Ashéninka Perené), a Kampa Arawak language of Peru. It is shown that the deverbalization of lexical nominalizations is basically total. The substantivization cline of lexical nominalizations is characterized by various degrees of acquisition of nominal properties. Clausal nominalizations are found to retain aspect and realis marking and preserve argument structure. Clausal realis nominalizations display a variety of nominal characteristics such as spatial case, nominal plural number, and definiteness marking. Clausal irrealis nominalizations show highly restricted nominal properties. The relativization strategy is formed with the help of the participant nominalizers -
This paper seeks to rigorously evaluate a set of claims that lexical items in Southern Arawak languages are loanwords from Tupi-Guarani languages. I show that, in most cases, these hypotheses can be rejected because the Arawak forms in question either have clear internal etymologies or because the noted similarities are too superficial and no coherent or plausible picture for the phonological deviation between the putative loans and their presumed source forms can be offered. In advancing internal etymologies for the target Arawak forms I will also try to cast light on aspects of the historical developments of these languages, as well as raise some so far unacknowledged issues for future research. Next, I consider some plausible cases of Guarani loans in one Southern Arawak language, Terena, explicitly arguing for these contact etymologies and placing these loanwords within a chronological stratum in Terena history. Complications related to dissimilar sources in Arawak-Tupi-Guarani contact and to the status of Wanderwörter are also briefly addressed.
This study examines the interaction of contrastive focus-marking with nominalization in bisected contrastive focus constructions of Alto Perené, a Kampa Arawak language of Peru. It also investigates morphosyntactic means of contrastive focus-marking in two neighboring Kampa languages, Ashéninka Pichis and Ashaninka Tambo. The languages are shown to employ various focus-marking strategies. The Alto Perené polar (truth value) focus construction shows a preference for nominalizing a lexical verb. In Ashaninka Tambo, the expression of polar and modal operator focus (the latter attested in negated clauses) does not require nominalization of the lexical verb, but in clefted content and polar questions and affirmative declarative clauses, nominalization is mandatory for the purpose of argument focusing. In Ashéninka Pichis, the argument focus-marking strategies include the syntactic movement of the focus constituent to the preverbal focus position and either an elision of the subject index on the verb, or inflecting the verb for stative aspect.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.