This paper provides a first analysis of the tense-aspect system of Yawarana (yar), a Cariban lang... more This paper provides a first analysis of the tense-aspect system of Yawarana (yar), a Cariban language spoken in Amazonas State in Venezuela. The data analyzed stems from a documentation collection consisting of recordings of 13 of about 30 known conversational speakers of Yawarana. The inflectional morphology of Yawarana is relatively simple in comparison to nearby Cariban languages, with many fewer person prefixes, fewer inflectional suffixes, and no splits in alignment; in compensation, syntactic collocations with auxiliaries, clitics, and particles play a larger role in creating tense-aspect distinctions. Main clause verbs in Yawarana have a single suffix slot for inflectional tense-aspect morphology, the same slot that holds all category-changing derivational morphology. The inventory of inflectional suffixes in this slot includes three past tense suffixes, two that are identical to synchronic nominalizers (-sapë,-jpë) and one to an adverbializer (-se). This paper illustrates problems encountered in determining whether each of these forms primarily encodes tense or aspect. Crucial to answering this question is an examination of how the meaning of a given tense-aspect suffix combines with the inherent lexical aspect (especially telic vs. states) of different verbs. Examining all examples of these suffixes in our text corpus, we conclude that the suffix-se encodes past perfective,-jpë encodes past tense with no aspectual value, and-sapë is heterogeneous, with a perfect reading on lexical verbs and a simple past tense reading on the copula. Further, the two past tense forms of the copular auxiliary (one with-jpë, the other with-sapë) are specialized to occur in different constructions, chi-jpë with the progressive and wej-sapë with all other compound tense-aspects.
Most postpositions in modern Cariban languages are bipartite, composed of a stem that indicates p... more Most postpositions in modern Cariban languages are bipartite, composed of a stem that indicates properties of the ground with reference to which the object is located (e.g., liquid, open space, container, hand, back) plus a suffix that indicates the type of relation (e.g., static location, allative, ablative, perlative). While bipartite postpositions are ubiquitous in modern languages, surprisingly, very few are fully cognate: cognate stems often take a non-cognate suffix, or cognate suffixes often occur with noncognate stems. We conclude that the antecedent to modern bipartite postpositions was a syntactic phrasal construction in (Pre-)Proto-Cariban, in which modern stems were relational nouns, modern suffixes were cliticized postpositions, and different combinations lexicalized in different modern languages. We also track more recent innovations by which some older stems have become suffixes, some sequences of postpositions have become compound suffixes, and innovative stems have come from other parts of speech.
The term grammaticalization originally denoted a particular outcome of language change (lexis > m... more The term grammaticalization originally denoted a particular outcome of language change (lexis > morphology), then got expanded to practically all studies involving language change, the processes that create such changes, and a theory modeling these. These expansions have been challenged in the literature as conceptually flawed. A usage-based analysis of the evolution of the concept culminates in the use of the term grammaticalization as a "flag" of a particular approach to linguistics. However, the theoretical premises of grammaticalization studies are entirely compatible with the premises of Diachronic Construction Grammar (DCxG). All studies within the "expanded" concept of grammaticalization can be explicitly modeled within DCxG, which provides formalism of sufficient detail to map the gradual nature of language change in cases of grammaticalization and beyond. Consequently, the most vigorous attacks on grammaticalization lose power when grammaticalization is seen as part of a larger, more complete theory of language and language change.
The curious case of reconstruction in syntax, 2020
The general consensus in the historical linguistics community for the last half a century or so h... more The general consensus in the historical linguistics community for the last half a century or so has been that syntactic reconstruction is a bootless and unsuccessful venture. However, this view has slowly but steadily been changing among historical linguists, typologists, and anthropological linguists alike. More and more syntactic reconstructions are being published by respectable and virtuous publication venues. The debate on the viability of syntactic reconstruction, however, continues, and issues like i) lack of cognates, ii) lack of arbitrariness in syntax, iii) lack of directionality in syntactic change, iv) lack of continuous transmission from one generation to the next, and v) lack of form-meaning correspondences have, drop by drop, been argued not to be problematic for syntactic reconstruction. The present volume contributes to two of these issues in detail; first the issue of reliably identifying cognates in syntax and second , the issue of directionality in syntactic change. A systematic program is suggested for identifying cognates in syntax, which by definition is a different enterprise from identifying cognates in phonology or morphology. Examples are given from several different language families: Indo-European, Semitic, Austronesian, Jê, Cariban, and Chibchan. Regarding the issue of directionality for syntactic reconstruction, most of the studies in this volume also demonstrate how local directionality may be identified with the aid of different types of morphosyntactic flags, particularly showcased with examples from Chibchan, Semitic, and various Indo-European languages.
In this article, we take the strong position that syntactic constructions can be reconstructed , ... more In this article, we take the strong position that syntactic constructions can be reconstructed , first by identifying constructional cognates, then by identifying evidence for the directionality of constructional change that best explains the modern distribution of the cognate constructions from the hypothesized source construction. Further, we argue that the grammatical properties of the resultant constructions are often best explained by a combination of their etymological source(s) and the evolutionary pathways by which they arise. We illustrate these larger theoretical claims by reconstructing a typologically unusual set of constructions in the Jê and Cariban families, which present a rare ergative alignment pattern we call nominative-absolutive. Prior to 2010 this alignment pattern, which combines nominative free pronouns and absolutive verbal indexation, was held to be impossible, and it remains attested in very few language families. In the Jê and Cariban languages, this alignment type always occurs as part of ergative splits conditioned by TAM, which are again counter to previously claimed universals in that they are conditioned by future tense, imperfective aspects, and agent-oriented modalities. We reconstruct the sources of these nominative-absolutive constructions and then argue that the unusual formal properties and functional distributions of the nominative-absolutive clause types are both best understood as combinations of typologically unusual source constructions that follow well-established diachronic pathways of tense-aspect-mood renewal.
International Journal of American Linguistics, 2018
This special issue of JHL reconstructs the diachrony of a number of innovations in the coding of ... more This special issue of JHL reconstructs the diachrony of a number of innovations in the coding of argument structure, particularly in the domain of verbal indexation, in four Amazonian language families (Chapacuran, Sáliban, Tukanoan and Tupi). It is one result of an international workshop on " Diachronic Morphosyntax in South American Languages " held in Lyon (France) in 2015, with financial support from the Collegium de Lyon (Institute for Advanced Study) and the LabEx ASLAN of the Université de Lyon. The goal was to encourage methodologically innovative (and more rigorous) historical studies of morphosyntactic patterns in languages or language families of South America. The five papers that compose this collection all demonstrate the viability of syntactic reconstruction, even in languages with little or no written history.
The main goal of this chapter is to discuss the value of the Construction Grammar framework to so... more The main goal of this chapter is to discuss the value of the Construction Grammar framework to solving perceived problems with diachronic syntax. As such, one part of this chapter provides a condensed review of previous research in diachronic syntax, including a brief discussion of why many linguists have doubted the value of such work. While most of this early work did not emphasize the importance of constructions to our understanding of either synchronic or diachronic syntax, we do identify earlier examples of work for which the notion of construction was crucial, although not richly developed. The bulk of the chapter then proposes ways in which a constructional perspective/theory allows us to address some of these perceived problems with the study of diachronic syntax, hence providing a research context for the individual studies published in this volume.
In this paper, we take the strong position that syntactic constructions can be reconstructed, fir... more In this paper, we take the strong position that syntactic constructions can be reconstructed, first by identifying constructional cognates, then by identifying evidence for the directionality of constructional change that best explains the modern distribution of the cognate constructions from the hypothesized source construction. Further, we argue that the grammatical properties of the resultant constructions are often best explained by a combination of their etymological source(s) and the evolutionary pathways by which they arise. We illustrate these larger theoretical claims by reconstructing a typologically unusual set of constructions in the Jê and Cariban families, which present a rare ergative alignment pattern we call nominativeabsolutive. This alignment pattern, with nominative dependent-marking and absolutive verbal indexation, was held to be impossible prior to 2010, and remains attested in very few language families. In the Jê and Cariban languages, this alignment type always occurs as part of ergative splits conditioned by TAM, which are again counter to previously held universals in that they are conditioned by future tense, imperfective aspects, and agent-oriented modalities. We reconstruct the sources of these nominative-absolutive constructions and then argue that the unusual formal properties and functional distributions of the nominative-absolutive clause types are both best understood as combinations of typologically unusual source constructions that follow wellestablished diachronic pathways of tense-aspect-mood renewal.
A survey of the adverbial clause structures found in the texts appended to Fox (2003). Lots of da... more A survey of the adverbial clause structures found in the texts appended to Fox (2003). Lots of data, most with preliminary analyses.
This paper is essentially three papers rolled up into one: the first documents a typologically un... more This paper is essentially three papers rolled up into one: the first documents a typologically unusual case of tense-aspect-based split ergativity in the Akawaio language, one which is, in some ways, reminiscent of a voice distinction. The other two papers provide empirical tests of a hypothesized interaction between topicality and the selection of the ergative versus the nonergative clause types in Akawaio speech. The Fish Film study directly manipulates the attention of the speaker, and observes the effect of that manipulation on descriptions of animated scenes on the computer screen. Akawaio is the third language (of 20 tested so far) to show no effect of attention manipulation, either in the domain of the ergative split or otherwise. Givónian text counts measure the accessibility and importance (two aspects of topicality) of participants in traditional planned narrative discourse, and then seeks to correlate those measurements to grammar. Again, the results show no correlation between topicality and the ergative split. The final portion of the paper explains the unusual split as the transitional final stage in the replacement of one series of tense-aspect morphology with a new series, with the default clause type now the robust innovative ergative, and the etymologically prior nonergative clause type now used only in stylistically marked contexts.
L'ergativité en Amazonie, v. 1, ed. by F. Queixalós. Brasília: CNRS, IRD and the Laboratório de ... more L'ergativité en Amazonie, v. 1, ed. by F. Queixalós. Brasília: CNRS, IRD and the Laboratório de Línguas Indígenas, UnB.
The purpose of this paper is to offer a framework for organizing the three primary types of ergative main clauses in the Cariban language family, and to briefly characterize what is known about the morphological and syntactic properties of each. I will also discuss briefly the main point of typological interest, which is that the tense-aspect based ergative splits in individual northern Cariban languages do not conform with expected universal patterns (cf. §4). While I will offer brief examples from individual languages to illustrate the claims I make here, in most cases, many more examples and much more detailed argumentation can be found in prior publications (cf. specific citations in various subsections). I encourage the interested (and especially the skeptical) reader to use this brief synopsis as a guide to points of interest that can be found in those works.
Línguas Indígenas Brasileiras. Fonologia, Gramática e História. Atas do I Encontro Internacional ... more Línguas Indígenas Brasileiras. Fonologia, Gramática e História. Atas do I Encontro Internacional do GTLI da ANPOLL, v. I, pp. 315-326, ed. by Ana Suelly Cabral and Aryon Rodrigues. Belem: Editoria Universitária U.F.P.A.
Arguing that the hierarchical verbal indexation system does not appear to be derived from the absolutive indexation system seen in Tupí-Guaranían subordinate clauses.
Unpublished paper based on the talk I gave at the International Congress of Americanists, Stockho... more Unpublished paper based on the talk I gave at the International Congress of Americanists, Stockholm, Sweden, June 1994.
Lingüística Tupí-Guaraní/Caribe, ed. by Ignacio Prado Pastor, 163-77. Revista Latinoamericana de... more Lingüística Tupí-Guaraní/Caribe, ed. by Ignacio Prado Pastor, 163-77. Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios Etnolingüísticos, v. VIII. Lima, Peru.
Paper for the 1994 International Congress of Americanists, reconstructing the form and function of the object nominalizing prefix in Cariban and pointing out intriguing similarities between it and the object nominalizing prefix in TG.
International Journal of American Linguistics, 1993
... language consultants were Pragedes Salas and Rafael Moncala of Perro de Agua, Miguel Castillo... more ... language consultants were Pragedes Salas and Rafael Moncala of Perro de Agua, Miguel Castillo of Santa F6, and Miguel Castro of Camana. ... In an intransitive clause, these two categories overlap, so that both markers agree with the intransitive subject, ken '3.Anim.Invisible'. ...
A scan of my paper in the 1993 Proceedings of ESCOLL, ed. by Michael Bernstein. Ithaca, NY: Depar... more A scan of my paper in the 1993 Proceedings of ESCOLL, ed. by Michael Bernstein. Ithaca, NY: Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics.
This paper provides a first analysis of the tense-aspect system of Yawarana (yar), a Cariban lang... more This paper provides a first analysis of the tense-aspect system of Yawarana (yar), a Cariban language spoken in Amazonas State in Venezuela. The data analyzed stems from a documentation collection consisting of recordings of 13 of about 30 known conversational speakers of Yawarana. The inflectional morphology of Yawarana is relatively simple in comparison to nearby Cariban languages, with many fewer person prefixes, fewer inflectional suffixes, and no splits in alignment; in compensation, syntactic collocations with auxiliaries, clitics, and particles play a larger role in creating tense-aspect distinctions. Main clause verbs in Yawarana have a single suffix slot for inflectional tense-aspect morphology, the same slot that holds all category-changing derivational morphology. The inventory of inflectional suffixes in this slot includes three past tense suffixes, two that are identical to synchronic nominalizers (-sapë,-jpë) and one to an adverbializer (-se). This paper illustrates problems encountered in determining whether each of these forms primarily encodes tense or aspect. Crucial to answering this question is an examination of how the meaning of a given tense-aspect suffix combines with the inherent lexical aspect (especially telic vs. states) of different verbs. Examining all examples of these suffixes in our text corpus, we conclude that the suffix-se encodes past perfective,-jpë encodes past tense with no aspectual value, and-sapë is heterogeneous, with a perfect reading on lexical verbs and a simple past tense reading on the copula. Further, the two past tense forms of the copular auxiliary (one with-jpë, the other with-sapë) are specialized to occur in different constructions, chi-jpë with the progressive and wej-sapë with all other compound tense-aspects.
Most postpositions in modern Cariban languages are bipartite, composed of a stem that indicates p... more Most postpositions in modern Cariban languages are bipartite, composed of a stem that indicates properties of the ground with reference to which the object is located (e.g., liquid, open space, container, hand, back) plus a suffix that indicates the type of relation (e.g., static location, allative, ablative, perlative). While bipartite postpositions are ubiquitous in modern languages, surprisingly, very few are fully cognate: cognate stems often take a non-cognate suffix, or cognate suffixes often occur with noncognate stems. We conclude that the antecedent to modern bipartite postpositions was a syntactic phrasal construction in (Pre-)Proto-Cariban, in which modern stems were relational nouns, modern suffixes were cliticized postpositions, and different combinations lexicalized in different modern languages. We also track more recent innovations by which some older stems have become suffixes, some sequences of postpositions have become compound suffixes, and innovative stems have come from other parts of speech.
The term grammaticalization originally denoted a particular outcome of language change (lexis > m... more The term grammaticalization originally denoted a particular outcome of language change (lexis > morphology), then got expanded to practically all studies involving language change, the processes that create such changes, and a theory modeling these. These expansions have been challenged in the literature as conceptually flawed. A usage-based analysis of the evolution of the concept culminates in the use of the term grammaticalization as a "flag" of a particular approach to linguistics. However, the theoretical premises of grammaticalization studies are entirely compatible with the premises of Diachronic Construction Grammar (DCxG). All studies within the "expanded" concept of grammaticalization can be explicitly modeled within DCxG, which provides formalism of sufficient detail to map the gradual nature of language change in cases of grammaticalization and beyond. Consequently, the most vigorous attacks on grammaticalization lose power when grammaticalization is seen as part of a larger, more complete theory of language and language change.
The curious case of reconstruction in syntax, 2020
The general consensus in the historical linguistics community for the last half a century or so h... more The general consensus in the historical linguistics community for the last half a century or so has been that syntactic reconstruction is a bootless and unsuccessful venture. However, this view has slowly but steadily been changing among historical linguists, typologists, and anthropological linguists alike. More and more syntactic reconstructions are being published by respectable and virtuous publication venues. The debate on the viability of syntactic reconstruction, however, continues, and issues like i) lack of cognates, ii) lack of arbitrariness in syntax, iii) lack of directionality in syntactic change, iv) lack of continuous transmission from one generation to the next, and v) lack of form-meaning correspondences have, drop by drop, been argued not to be problematic for syntactic reconstruction. The present volume contributes to two of these issues in detail; first the issue of reliably identifying cognates in syntax and second , the issue of directionality in syntactic change. A systematic program is suggested for identifying cognates in syntax, which by definition is a different enterprise from identifying cognates in phonology or morphology. Examples are given from several different language families: Indo-European, Semitic, Austronesian, Jê, Cariban, and Chibchan. Regarding the issue of directionality for syntactic reconstruction, most of the studies in this volume also demonstrate how local directionality may be identified with the aid of different types of morphosyntactic flags, particularly showcased with examples from Chibchan, Semitic, and various Indo-European languages.
In this article, we take the strong position that syntactic constructions can be reconstructed , ... more In this article, we take the strong position that syntactic constructions can be reconstructed , first by identifying constructional cognates, then by identifying evidence for the directionality of constructional change that best explains the modern distribution of the cognate constructions from the hypothesized source construction. Further, we argue that the grammatical properties of the resultant constructions are often best explained by a combination of their etymological source(s) and the evolutionary pathways by which they arise. We illustrate these larger theoretical claims by reconstructing a typologically unusual set of constructions in the Jê and Cariban families, which present a rare ergative alignment pattern we call nominative-absolutive. Prior to 2010 this alignment pattern, which combines nominative free pronouns and absolutive verbal indexation, was held to be impossible, and it remains attested in very few language families. In the Jê and Cariban languages, this alignment type always occurs as part of ergative splits conditioned by TAM, which are again counter to previously claimed universals in that they are conditioned by future tense, imperfective aspects, and agent-oriented modalities. We reconstruct the sources of these nominative-absolutive constructions and then argue that the unusual formal properties and functional distributions of the nominative-absolutive clause types are both best understood as combinations of typologically unusual source constructions that follow well-established diachronic pathways of tense-aspect-mood renewal.
International Journal of American Linguistics, 2018
This special issue of JHL reconstructs the diachrony of a number of innovations in the coding of ... more This special issue of JHL reconstructs the diachrony of a number of innovations in the coding of argument structure, particularly in the domain of verbal indexation, in four Amazonian language families (Chapacuran, Sáliban, Tukanoan and Tupi). It is one result of an international workshop on " Diachronic Morphosyntax in South American Languages " held in Lyon (France) in 2015, with financial support from the Collegium de Lyon (Institute for Advanced Study) and the LabEx ASLAN of the Université de Lyon. The goal was to encourage methodologically innovative (and more rigorous) historical studies of morphosyntactic patterns in languages or language families of South America. The five papers that compose this collection all demonstrate the viability of syntactic reconstruction, even in languages with little or no written history.
The main goal of this chapter is to discuss the value of the Construction Grammar framework to so... more The main goal of this chapter is to discuss the value of the Construction Grammar framework to solving perceived problems with diachronic syntax. As such, one part of this chapter provides a condensed review of previous research in diachronic syntax, including a brief discussion of why many linguists have doubted the value of such work. While most of this early work did not emphasize the importance of constructions to our understanding of either synchronic or diachronic syntax, we do identify earlier examples of work for which the notion of construction was crucial, although not richly developed. The bulk of the chapter then proposes ways in which a constructional perspective/theory allows us to address some of these perceived problems with the study of diachronic syntax, hence providing a research context for the individual studies published in this volume.
In this paper, we take the strong position that syntactic constructions can be reconstructed, fir... more In this paper, we take the strong position that syntactic constructions can be reconstructed, first by identifying constructional cognates, then by identifying evidence for the directionality of constructional change that best explains the modern distribution of the cognate constructions from the hypothesized source construction. Further, we argue that the grammatical properties of the resultant constructions are often best explained by a combination of their etymological source(s) and the evolutionary pathways by which they arise. We illustrate these larger theoretical claims by reconstructing a typologically unusual set of constructions in the Jê and Cariban families, which present a rare ergative alignment pattern we call nominativeabsolutive. This alignment pattern, with nominative dependent-marking and absolutive verbal indexation, was held to be impossible prior to 2010, and remains attested in very few language families. In the Jê and Cariban languages, this alignment type always occurs as part of ergative splits conditioned by TAM, which are again counter to previously held universals in that they are conditioned by future tense, imperfective aspects, and agent-oriented modalities. We reconstruct the sources of these nominative-absolutive constructions and then argue that the unusual formal properties and functional distributions of the nominative-absolutive clause types are both best understood as combinations of typologically unusual source constructions that follow wellestablished diachronic pathways of tense-aspect-mood renewal.
A survey of the adverbial clause structures found in the texts appended to Fox (2003). Lots of da... more A survey of the adverbial clause structures found in the texts appended to Fox (2003). Lots of data, most with preliminary analyses.
This paper is essentially three papers rolled up into one: the first documents a typologically un... more This paper is essentially three papers rolled up into one: the first documents a typologically unusual case of tense-aspect-based split ergativity in the Akawaio language, one which is, in some ways, reminiscent of a voice distinction. The other two papers provide empirical tests of a hypothesized interaction between topicality and the selection of the ergative versus the nonergative clause types in Akawaio speech. The Fish Film study directly manipulates the attention of the speaker, and observes the effect of that manipulation on descriptions of animated scenes on the computer screen. Akawaio is the third language (of 20 tested so far) to show no effect of attention manipulation, either in the domain of the ergative split or otherwise. Givónian text counts measure the accessibility and importance (two aspects of topicality) of participants in traditional planned narrative discourse, and then seeks to correlate those measurements to grammar. Again, the results show no correlation between topicality and the ergative split. The final portion of the paper explains the unusual split as the transitional final stage in the replacement of one series of tense-aspect morphology with a new series, with the default clause type now the robust innovative ergative, and the etymologically prior nonergative clause type now used only in stylistically marked contexts.
L'ergativité en Amazonie, v. 1, ed. by F. Queixalós. Brasília: CNRS, IRD and the Laboratório de ... more L'ergativité en Amazonie, v. 1, ed. by F. Queixalós. Brasília: CNRS, IRD and the Laboratório de Línguas Indígenas, UnB.
The purpose of this paper is to offer a framework for organizing the three primary types of ergative main clauses in the Cariban language family, and to briefly characterize what is known about the morphological and syntactic properties of each. I will also discuss briefly the main point of typological interest, which is that the tense-aspect based ergative splits in individual northern Cariban languages do not conform with expected universal patterns (cf. §4). While I will offer brief examples from individual languages to illustrate the claims I make here, in most cases, many more examples and much more detailed argumentation can be found in prior publications (cf. specific citations in various subsections). I encourage the interested (and especially the skeptical) reader to use this brief synopsis as a guide to points of interest that can be found in those works.
Línguas Indígenas Brasileiras. Fonologia, Gramática e História. Atas do I Encontro Internacional ... more Línguas Indígenas Brasileiras. Fonologia, Gramática e História. Atas do I Encontro Internacional do GTLI da ANPOLL, v. I, pp. 315-326, ed. by Ana Suelly Cabral and Aryon Rodrigues. Belem: Editoria Universitária U.F.P.A.
Arguing that the hierarchical verbal indexation system does not appear to be derived from the absolutive indexation system seen in Tupí-Guaranían subordinate clauses.
Unpublished paper based on the talk I gave at the International Congress of Americanists, Stockho... more Unpublished paper based on the talk I gave at the International Congress of Americanists, Stockholm, Sweden, June 1994.
Lingüística Tupí-Guaraní/Caribe, ed. by Ignacio Prado Pastor, 163-77. Revista Latinoamericana de... more Lingüística Tupí-Guaraní/Caribe, ed. by Ignacio Prado Pastor, 163-77. Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios Etnolingüísticos, v. VIII. Lima, Peru.
Paper for the 1994 International Congress of Americanists, reconstructing the form and function of the object nominalizing prefix in Cariban and pointing out intriguing similarities between it and the object nominalizing prefix in TG.
International Journal of American Linguistics, 1993
... language consultants were Pragedes Salas and Rafael Moncala of Perro de Agua, Miguel Castillo... more ... language consultants were Pragedes Salas and Rafael Moncala of Perro de Agua, Miguel Castillo of Santa F6, and Miguel Castro of Camana. ... In an intransitive clause, these two categories overlap, so that both markers agree with the intransitive subject, ken '3.Anim.Invisible'. ...
A scan of my paper in the 1993 Proceedings of ESCOLL, ed. by Michael Bernstein. Ithaca, NY: Depar... more A scan of my paper in the 1993 Proceedings of ESCOLL, ed. by Michael Bernstein. Ithaca, NY: Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics.
This paper presents a first survey of the morphology and syntax of verbal negation in the Cariban... more This paper presents a first survey of the morphology and syntax of verbal negation in the Cariban language family. After a brief survey of the negative suffix(es) and a unique third person prefix on the negative verb (§1), we consider the argument structure of the “standard” negative construction (§2), some possible hypotheses for the etymologies of the non-cognate negative suffixes found in Kari’nja, Panare, Tiriyó, and Yawarana (§3), and the innovative argument structure of the Makushi and Akawaio negative constructions (§4).
Presented 9 September, 2016, at the Workshop "40 Years After Keenan 1976", hosted at the Universi... more Presented 9 September, 2016, at the Workshop "40 Years After Keenan 1976", hosted at the University of Ghent by the ERC project "The Evolution of Case, Alignment and Argument Structure in Indo-European".
Presented at CRLAO, Paris, 25 March, 2015
When a language has some ergative alignment pattern, i... more Presented at CRLAO, Paris, 25 March, 2015
When a language has some ergative alignment pattern, it is usually found in only a subset of grammatical contexts, creating what has been called split ergativity. In one common pattern, tense-aspect-based split ergativity, ergative alignment occurs only in past tense or perfective aspect clauses, while some other alignment occurs elsewhere (Dixon 1994). Theoreticians have tried to explain these splits as a grammatical expression of abstract notions like viewpoint, transitivity, inherent agentivity, and ontological salience. In recent research, we have discovered that multiple languages from the Cariban and Jê families (spoken in northern and central South America) present the opposite pattern, in which ergative alignment occurs only in nonpast and imperfective clauses. Trivially, such facts contradict the putative universal about split ergativity; less trivially, they call into question the proposed explanations for that universal. This talk proposes to explain both the universal and counter-universal patterns with reference to the concrete details of historical processes that create individual clause types with their distinct alignments (cf. Gildea 2012). The metaphor of "split" ergativity (or any other form of “split” alignment) encourages us to misconceptualize the phenomenon as a kind of “surface” division of some “deeper”, somehow fundamentally unified phenomenon. However, the evolution of such alignments suggests a completely different metaphor, that of a patchwork quilt: different constructions (with their different alignment) are like new patches added to the existing quilt of main clause grammar. This metaphor derives from the evolution of “splits", but it also helps to frame the synchronic analysis of such alignments in a more useful way. This sort of explanation illustrates the potential of diachronic typology, both to help us understand the prevalence of typological universals (without lamenting the discovery of counter-examples) and to bring a new perspective to explanations of these universals (and their counter-examples).
Dixon, R M W. 1994. Ergativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gildea, Spike. 2012. Linguistic Studies in the Cariban Family. Handbook of South American Languages, ed. by Lyle Campbell and Veronica Grondona, 441-494. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Areal Patterns of Grammaticalization. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Mainz, Germany, 12-14 ... more Areal Patterns of Grammaticalization. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Mainz, Germany, 12-14 March.
Workshop: Voice systems in diachrony: a comparative perspective. University of Pavia, Italy, 11 S... more Workshop: Voice systems in diachrony: a comparative perspective. University of Pavia, Italy, 11 September, 2014; revised and expanded for a talk at the University of Leiden 16 Feb, 2015.
Despite the relatively rich descriptive literature in the Cariban family, there is no canonical passive construction that is widely attested in the various sister languages. In descriptions available thus far, modern Cariban languages utilize four distinct constructions to code a passive function: the reflexive and three structurally more canonical passives, with patient subjects and optional oblique agent phrases. Of these four, only the reflexive-as-passive is reconstructible to Proto-Cariban with this function; the other three constructions are young enough to be readily reconstructible to their distinct sources. This paper will summarize the reconstructions of each different passive, then discuss how the four distinct constructions interact over time to share the encoding of the passive function.
• Reflexive > Middle > Passive Every attested Cariban language has a modern reflex of the DETRANSITIVIZING prefix, which goes on transitive verbs and derives an intransitive verb whose single argument is either simultaneously agent and patient (i.e., reflexive) or a patient (middle/passive). In this construction, it is not possible to explicitly indicate an agent via an oblique phrase, nor does an absent agent appear to control any grammatical properties at all, a significant difference from the Romance reflexives documented in Cennamo (1993). Crucially for the definition of passive in Givón (2001) and Heine (2002), the detransitive verbs sometime appear in clauses where there is an (unexpressable) semantic agent distinct from the patient (1-2). In these cases, the construction is arguably an agentless passive with a patient subject.
• Causative-Reflexive > Agentive Passive In Ye’kwana and Bakairi, there is a construction in which the patient is the subject, the agent an optional PP, and the passive verb bears both the reflexive and causative morphemes (3-4). This development has been reported only recently, in work in progress by Cáceres (for Ye’kwana) and Meira (for Bakairi). Although newly reported in the Cariban family, the causative-reflexive source of passive has been documented for other languages (Haspelmath 1990).
• Adjectival-Stative Participle > Passive In Carib of Surinam and Apalaí, there is a construction in which the patient is subject of an optional copular auxiliary, agent is optionally expressed via an oblique PP, and the verb bears participial morphology (5-6). This has been reconstructed (Gildea 1997) to the cognate construction found in most modern Cariban languages: like an adjective, the participle codes a state (often the result of an event), which can be a stative predicate (cf. ‘the window was already broken’), but with no grammatical means to express the agent; to form the passive, the predicate participle gains eventive semantics and an innovative agent phrase is added. In a further development, the cognate construction serves as an ergative main clause in Tiriyó, Wayana, and Katxúyana.
• Patient Nominalization > Passive In Panare, there is a construction in which the patient is subject of an optional copular auxiliary, agent is optionally expressed in an oblique PP, and the verb bears the suffix -sa’ ‘PAST PARTICIPLE’ (7). This form has been reconstructed to a patient (actually absolutive) nominalization (Gildea 1998: 120), a function that is still attested in modern Panare (Payne & Payne 2013). In a further development, the cognate construction in the Pemón Group (Akawaio, Makushi, Pemón) is an ergative perfect clause.
Amazónicas 5: La estructura de las lenguas amazónicas: fonología y sintaxis. Museu Paraense Emíli... more Amazónicas 5: La estructura de las lenguas amazónicas: fonología y sintaxis. Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi & Universidade Federal do Pará, Belém, Brazil, 23-28 May, 2014
The aim of this paper is to give a comprehensive description of the suffix-pödï of Akawaio (Carib... more The aim of this paper is to give a comprehensive description of the suffix-pödï of Akawaio (Cariban, Venezuelan). In particular, we aim at investigating the functions that this marker can express and the grammatical status that it has in the grammar of Akawaio. This is a challenge because-pödï shows broad multifunctionality that has not been fully explored before. A review of the typological phenomenon of pluractionality suggests that all of the functions of this suffix can be captured within the pluractional conceptual space. In addition to mapping the functions of-pödï into the Pluractional space, we also identify additional morphology that explains the absence of-pödï in the other typical pluractional functions. Finally, we give an overview of pluractional markers in other Cariban languages with particular reference to Kari'nja.
As descriptive linguists, we have both found ourselves perplexed by noun modifying constructions ... more As descriptive linguists, we have both found ourselves perplexed by noun modifying constructions that seem to reverse the syntactic relationship expected for the noun and its modifier. In Cariban, there is one construction where the modifier acts as the grammatical head and the noun acts as the grammatical dependent; in Alsea (Oregon Coast), this sort of "reversed" construction is a very common strategy for expressing attributive modification. Interestingly, in both languages these modification constructions appear to be identical to attributive possession, with the modifier in the slot of the possessum and the modified N in the slot of the possessor. Our joint effort to understand these constructions has led us to the realization that this counterintuitive sort of construction is far from unusual, although rarely the default modification construction in a given language. There appears to be little typological attention paid to such reversed modification constructions (with Malchukov 2000 as a notable exception), nor a common term to describe them. The earliest study we found that names such a construction comes from Ross' (1998): Possessor-Like Attributive Constructions, or PLACs.
This is a preprint of the introduction to our edited volume, Reconstructing Syntax, currently und... more This is a preprint of the introduction to our edited volume, Reconstructing Syntax, currently under review at Brill Press. In this introduction, we propose a concrete and rigorous methodology for identifying syntactic cognates and for identifying the directionality of changes, the combination putting the reconstruction of syntax on a more solid theoretical and empirical foundation.
The present volume is a collection of 13 articles selected from 32 presentations at a special ses... more The present volume is a collection of 13 articles selected from 32 presentations at a special session on nonverbal predication at the international conference Amazônicas V, that took place in Belem, Brazil, in May 2014. 1 The papers are primarily descriptive and historical, offering abundant data generally from original and extensive periods of fieldwork, often on languages with relatively little prior description. Thus, each contribution in this volume contains a great deal of new data and analyses, presenting a far more detailed picture of nonverbal predication in individual languages than is found in published grammatical descriptions. Several contributions also offer historical reconstructions, from either comparative data or internal reconstruction.
This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, which pe... more This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Further information and the complete license text can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ The terms of the CC license apply only to the original material. The use of material from other sources (indicated by a reference) such as diagrams, illustrations, photos and text samples may require further permission from the respective copyright holder.
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Papers by Spike Gildea
new series, with the default clause type now the robust innovative ergative, and the etymologically prior nonergative clause type now used only in stylistically marked contexts.
The purpose of this paper is to offer a framework for organizing the three primary types of ergative main clauses in the Cariban language family, and to briefly characterize what is known about the morphological and syntactic properties of each. I will also discuss briefly the main point of typological interest, which is that the tense-aspect based ergative splits in individual northern Cariban languages do not conform with expected universal patterns (cf. §4). While I will offer brief examples from individual languages to illustrate the claims I make here, in most cases, many more examples and much more detailed argumentation can be found in prior publications (cf. specific citations in various subsections). I encourage the interested (and especially the skeptical) reader to use this brief synopsis as a guide to points of interest that can be found in those works.
Arguing that the hierarchical verbal indexation system does not appear to be derived from the absolutive indexation system seen in Tupí-Guaranían subordinate clauses.
Paper for the 1994 International Congress of Americanists, reconstructing the form and function of the object nominalizing prefix in Cariban and pointing out intriguing similarities between it and the object nominalizing prefix in TG.
new series, with the default clause type now the robust innovative ergative, and the etymologically prior nonergative clause type now used only in stylistically marked contexts.
The purpose of this paper is to offer a framework for organizing the three primary types of ergative main clauses in the Cariban language family, and to briefly characterize what is known about the morphological and syntactic properties of each. I will also discuss briefly the main point of typological interest, which is that the tense-aspect based ergative splits in individual northern Cariban languages do not conform with expected universal patterns (cf. §4). While I will offer brief examples from individual languages to illustrate the claims I make here, in most cases, many more examples and much more detailed argumentation can be found in prior publications (cf. specific citations in various subsections). I encourage the interested (and especially the skeptical) reader to use this brief synopsis as a guide to points of interest that can be found in those works.
Arguing that the hierarchical verbal indexation system does not appear to be derived from the absolutive indexation system seen in Tupí-Guaranían subordinate clauses.
Paper for the 1994 International Congress of Americanists, reconstructing the form and function of the object nominalizing prefix in Cariban and pointing out intriguing similarities between it and the object nominalizing prefix in TG.
When a language has some ergative alignment pattern, it is usually found in only a subset of grammatical contexts, creating what has been called split ergativity. In one common pattern, tense-aspect-based split ergativity, ergative alignment occurs only in past tense or perfective aspect clauses, while some other alignment occurs elsewhere (Dixon 1994). Theoreticians have tried to explain these splits as a grammatical expression of abstract notions like viewpoint, transitivity, inherent agentivity, and ontological salience. In recent research, we have discovered that multiple languages from the Cariban and Jê families (spoken in northern and central South America) present the opposite pattern, in which ergative alignment occurs only in nonpast and imperfective clauses. Trivially, such facts contradict the putative universal about split ergativity; less trivially, they call into question the proposed explanations for that universal. This talk proposes to explain both the universal and counter-universal patterns with reference to the concrete details of historical processes that create individual clause types with their distinct alignments (cf. Gildea 2012).
The metaphor of "split" ergativity (or any other form of “split” alignment) encourages us to misconceptualize the phenomenon as a kind of “surface” division of some “deeper”, somehow fundamentally unified phenomenon. However, the evolution of such alignments suggests a completely different metaphor, that of a patchwork quilt: different constructions (with their different alignment) are like new patches added to the existing quilt of main clause grammar. This metaphor derives from the evolution of “splits", but it also helps to frame the synchronic analysis of such alignments in a more useful way. This sort of explanation illustrates the potential of diachronic typology, both to help us understand the prevalence of typological universals (without lamenting the discovery of counter-examples) and to bring a new perspective to explanations of these universals (and their counter-examples).
Dixon, R M W. 1994. Ergativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gildea, Spike. 2012. Linguistic Studies in the Cariban Family. Handbook of South American Languages, ed. by Lyle Campbell and Veronica Grondona, 441-494. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Despite the relatively rich descriptive literature in the Cariban family, there is no canonical passive construction that is widely attested in the various sister languages. In descriptions available thus far, modern Cariban languages utilize four distinct constructions to code a passive function: the reflexive and three structurally more canonical passives, with patient subjects and optional oblique agent phrases. Of these four, only the reflexive-as-passive is reconstructible to Proto-Cariban with this function; the other three constructions are young enough to be readily reconstructible to their distinct sources. This paper will summarize the reconstructions of each different passive, then discuss how the four distinct constructions interact over time to share the encoding of the passive function.
• Reflexive > Middle > Passive
Every attested Cariban language has a modern reflex of the DETRANSITIVIZING prefix, which goes on transitive verbs and derives an intransitive verb whose single argument is either simultaneously agent and patient (i.e., reflexive) or a patient (middle/passive). In this construction, it is not possible to explicitly indicate an agent via an oblique phrase, nor does an absent agent appear to control any grammatical properties at all, a significant difference from the Romance reflexives documented in Cennamo (1993). Crucially for the definition of passive in Givón (2001) and Heine (2002), the detransitive verbs sometime appear in clauses where there is an (unexpressable) semantic agent distinct from the patient (1-2). In these cases, the construction is arguably an agentless passive with a patient subject.
• Causative-Reflexive > Agentive Passive
In Ye’kwana and Bakairi, there is a construction in which the patient is the subject, the agent an optional PP, and the passive verb bears both the reflexive and causative morphemes (3-4). This development has been reported only recently, in work in progress by Cáceres (for Ye’kwana) and Meira (for Bakairi). Although newly reported in the Cariban family, the causative-reflexive source of passive has been documented for other languages (Haspelmath 1990).
• Adjectival-Stative Participle > Passive
In Carib of Surinam and Apalaí, there is a construction in which the patient is subject of an optional copular auxiliary, agent is optionally expressed via an oblique PP, and the verb bears participial morphology (5-6). This has been reconstructed (Gildea 1997) to the cognate construction found in most modern Cariban languages: like an adjective, the participle codes a state (often the result of an event), which can be a stative predicate (cf. ‘the window was already broken’), but with no grammatical means to express the agent; to form the passive, the predicate participle gains eventive semantics and an innovative agent phrase is added. In a further development, the cognate construction serves as an ergative main clause in Tiriyó, Wayana, and Katxúyana.
• Patient Nominalization > Passive
In Panare, there is a construction in which the patient is subject of an optional copular auxiliary, agent is optionally expressed in an oblique PP, and the verb bears the suffix -sa’ ‘PAST PARTICIPLE’ (7). This form has been reconstructed to a patient (actually absolutive) nominalization (Gildea 1998: 120), a function that is still attested in modern Panare (Payne & Payne 2013). In a further development, the cognate construction in the Pemón Group (Akawaio, Makushi, Pemón) is an ergative perfect clause.