Arawakan (Brazil) morphosyntax

From the introduction: The purpose of this study is to present some of the major morphosyntactic characteristics of eight Arawakan languages spoken in Brazil. [...] The five areas of morphosyntax which are treated in tern in the following sections are: word order, case marking, verb morphology, coordination, and subordination. As will be seen in section 3, much of the morphosyntactic complexity of these languages is found in the verb, and certain phenomena that in other languages would be dealt with in other parts of the syntax are treated in that section, including: valence-changing devices such as causatives, passives and reflexives; negation; and gender agreement; for each of these, the discussion is extended to cover related aspects of the syntax, wherever the sources provide material for this

Are Cariban languages moving away from or towards ergative systems?

From the introduction: In this paper [...] I will be arguing for a direction of change in Cariban languages from systems that are purely ergative in both nominal case marking and verb agreement patterns (and which are probably of considerable antiquity) to mixed systems where in main clauses the core nominals are not marked at all and the verb agreement patterns are a mixture of nominative and absolutive, based on an agentivity-person hierarchy. Subordinate clauses take the form of nominalizations that retain characteristics of the older pure ergative system

Object initial languages

From the introduction: The purpose of the present paper is to present some facts that have come to our attention recently concerning a number of Amerindian languages which we believe do exhibit object-initial basic orders. The languages we shall discuss belong to South American Indian groups which are known to have suffered more or less catatrophic decline in numbers due to the onslaught of European settlement in the New World over the past five hundred years (see Hemming 1978). Since the historical accident of European colonial expansionism has had such a devastating effect in this case, linguists might be well advised to reduce henceforth the extent of the trust they place in alleged universals of constituent ordering, and should also be sceptical of the linguistic relevance of claims that certain basic orders are rare or \u27marked\u27. The geographically widespread character of the SVO order shared by English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch, for example, may be more directly relatable to the widespread expansion by speakers of those languages through colonization on every habitable continent of the globe than to anything about the naturalness of SVO order

Ergativity and transitivity in Paumarí

From the introduction: Paumarí, a Brazilian language belonging to the Arawaken family, has a split case-marking system of a type which, so far as I am aware, has not been previously reported. The ergative system occurs in clauses having the basic word order pattern, or in clauses where a significant part of the basic pattern is preserved. The nominative-accusative system occurs in clauses where other word orders are used. For the purpose of this paper, by basic word order I mean the pragmatically least marked and statistically most frequent order. Dixon (1979, 79-80) explains all split case systems in semantic terms, and discusses three basic types of conditioning factor: the semantic content of verbs, the semantic content of NP\u27s, and the tense/aspect choice. He goes so far as to explain the grammatically conditioned split that has been reported for some languages, i.e. where the morphologiccal marking differs between main and subordinate clauses, as being primarily conditioned by the semantics of the subordinate clause. In Paumarí, however, there does not seem to be any way of explaining the phenomenon except in terms of a grammatically conditioned split, this being strictly along the lines of word order patterns, although it seems more appropriate to describe it as two coexisting systems rather than a a single, split system. The semantic distinctions that have been proposed to account for split systems are not relevant, since the same range of semantic phenomena occurs in both the ergative and accusative systems. In this paper I first describe the dual case-marking system in Paumarí (s.1), and then discuss some implications it has for a theory of transitivity such as that proposed by Hopper and Thompson (1980) (s. 2). In the course of this discussion, I draw attention to a likely functional explanation for the existence of the two systems and for the word order patterns with which they correlate

The serial interaction of stress and syncope

Many languages respect the generalization that some or all unstressed vowels are deleted. This generalization proves elusive in classic Optimality Theory, however. The source of the problem is classic OT’s parallel evaluation, which requires that the effects of stress assignment and syncope be optimized together. This article argues for a version of OT called Harmonic Serialism, in which the effects of stress assignment and syncope can and must be evaluated sequentially. The results are potentially applicable to other domains where process interaction is best understood in derivational terms