Inverse system, agreement and distribution of clitics and free pronouns in Tenetehára
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26512/rbla.v17i1.61003Keywords:
Agreement, Clitics, Free Pronouns, Person Hierarchy, Inverse SystemAbstract
This paper focuses on the agreement system of the Tenetehára language in order to investigate how the person features are grammaticalized. The hypothesis proposed is that the occurrence of the person features on the verb morphology is regulated by the nominal hierarchy in which the [+participant] feature systematically outranks the [-participant] feature. As such, the transitive verbs will systematically agree with the argument that carries the [+participant, +/-speaker] feature regardless of the syntactic position it is merged to. However, when both the external and internal arguments exhibit the same set of semantic features [+participant, +/-speaker], a set of [+participant, +speaker, +hearer] prefixes is triggered. Furthermore, when both the subject and the object carry the [-participant] feature, syntactic and pragmatic constraints will regulate which argument markers will be used on the verb stem. As to the free pronouns, it is proposed that they only coindex the person φ-feature of the subject, since they do not refer to the person φ-feature of directs object nor of indirect objects.
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