Determiners and the Development of Grammatical Nominalization in Nivacle

• Manuel A. Otero ^[1] ; Alejandra Vidal ^[3] ; Doris L. Payne ^[2]
  1. [1] Eastern Connecticut State University

     Eastern Connecticut State University

     Town of Windham, Estados Unidos

     
  2. [2] Universidad Nacional de Formosa

     Universidad Nacional de Formosa

     Argentina

     
  3. [3] University of Oregon

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• Localización: Studia linguistica: A journal of general linguistics, ISSN 0039-3193, Vol. 75, Nº 2, 2021, págs. 234-264
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Nivacle, a Mataco-Mataguayan language of the South American Chaco, exhibits right branching syntax often involving determiners. The determiners express visibility, proximity, existence, have temporal implications, and mark abstract referents and nominalized clauses. This paper proposes that headless relative clauses arose by using determiners in grammatical nominalization via an amalgam source construction, while a certain complement clause structure may have arisen by using a determiner as a cataphoric pronoun before a co-referent clause. As background for the historical argument, we first introduce the determiners and predicating versus referring expressions. We then discuss the role of the determiners in grammatical nominalization to create headless relatives, and then the complement clause structure headed by ka=. Employing comparative Mataguayan data, we propose historical scenarios that may have yielded the two constructions.