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Pragmatic Structures in Aymara

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Pragmatic Structures in Aymara Pragmatic Structures in Aymara Petr Homola Matt Coler Codesign, s.r.o. INCAS3 Czech Republic The Netherlands [email protected] [email protected] Abstract highly marked typological rarity [. ]. Still more idiosyncratic is the combination of the thematic The paper describes overt marking of in- marker with a grammeme combining the two func- formation structure in the indigenous An- tions of question and negation.” dean language Aymara. In this paper we We are not aware of any other language (except show that although the word order is free, for, to some extent, Quechua) in which word or- Aymara is not a discourse-configurational der is irrelevant to information structure. Hard- language (Kiss, 1994); instead, informa- man (2000) says about Aymaran languages that tion structure is expressed only morpho- “[t]he structural elements of a sentence may occur logically by pragmatic suffixes. The mark- in any order and are at the disposal of the speaker ing of ‘topic’ is more flexible that the for stylistic play.” Hardman et al. (2001) say that marking of ‘focus’ (be it at the clause level word order in Aymara “affects only style, not the or NP-internal). Since overt marking of grammar nor basic semantics.” Bossong (1989) information structure is partial, this pa- says about Quechua (which is typologically very per also devotes considerable attention to similar) that “word order is not only free but it the resolution of underspecification in Ay- is not primarily used as a means for expressing mara. pragmatic functions as such.” A detailed analy- sis of morphological information structure mark- 1 Introduction ing in Aymara can thus shed light on this module Chomsky’s original approach to formal syntax as- of grammar which is not expressed morphologi- sumes that sentences consist of constituents and cally in most languages. that the type and order of these constituents define Section 2 presents basic facts about Aymara. configurations that specify grammatical relations. Section 3 describes the overtly marked discourse As has been shown by Hale (1983), there are lan- categories in Aymara. Section 4 describes the guages in which word order has no or limited rele- means of morphosyntactic, semantic and prag- vance for grammatical relations and the respective matic referent identification. Section 5 treats prag- constituent trees are flat. In most such languages, matic marking in complex predicates. Finally, we word order is said to specify information struc- conclude in Section 6. ture (hence the name discourse-configurational languages coined by Kiss (1994), as opposed 2 Basic Facts about Aymara to syntax-configurational languages). We show Aymara is spoken by communities in a region en- that Aymara is neither syntax-configurational nor compassing Bolivia, Chile and Peru, extending discourse-configurational. In this language, in- north of Lake Titicaca to south of Lake Poopó, be- formation structure is expressed solely morpho- tween the western limit of the Pacific coast val- logically. This is very rare and therefore Ay- leys and eastward to the Yungas valleys. The lan- mara is very important for the research of informa- guage is spoken by roughly two million speakers, tion structure in general. As Bossong (2009) puts over half of whom are Bolivian. The rest reside it (referring to Aymara and Quechua): “Cross- in Peru and Chile. The Aymaran family (com- linguistically, grammemes explicitly expressing prised of Aymara, Jaqaru, and Kawki) is a lin- the function of theme are not very frequent; gram- guistic isolate with no close relative. Aymara is memes expressing the function of the rheme are a 98 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (DepLing 2013), pages 98–107, Prague, August 27–30, 2013. c 2013 Charles University in Prague, Matfyzpress, Prague, Czech Republic an affixal polysynthetic1 language (according to Due to overt morphological marking of infor- Mattissen’s (2006) classification) with a rich mor- mation structure, there are discontinuous phrases phology. It is SOV with modifier-head word order. in which the “gap” is not motivated by pragmat- Aside from the morphologically unmarked sub- ics, such as (2)2. The corresponding tree is given ject, all syntactic relations are case-marked, typi- in Figure 1. cally on the NP head. Roots can be divided into (2) Juma-n-x jiw-i-w nouns (including qualitative words), verbs, and you-gen-ref die-smpl3 3-npred particles. Suffixes, which may have a morpholog- → kimsa ch’iyar phisi-ma-xa ical or syntactic effect, can be classified as nomi- three black cat-poss2-ref nal, verbal, transpositional, independent, or prag- “Your three black cats died.” matic suffixes. The category of independent suf- fixes is comprised of three suffixes which are not jiwiw classifiable as members of either nominal or verbal NPRED morphology which likewise cannot be said to be pragmatic suffixes. These suffixes generally occur prior to inflectional morphology and/or the prag- phisimaxaREF matic suffixes. Pragmatic suffixes, by comparison, typically suffix to the last word of the entire sen- tence and/or the NP or VP. As their name suggests, jumanxREF kimsa ch’iyar their function is overall pragmatic in nature. Nom- inal and verbal suffixes can be subdivided into Figure 1: The surface syntax tree of (2) with a dis- inflectional and derivational categories, but given continuous noun phrase the ease with which category-changing transposi- tional suffixes attach to words of any category, of- Of course, the possessive pronoun jumanx could ten multiple times, it is common to find words with also form a continuous constituent with the rest of several nominal, verbal, transpositional, and inde- the NP. Or, it might be omitted since the posses- pendent suffixes. siveness is already expressed with the suffix -ma Detailed information can be found in (Hardman (phisimaxa). et al., 2001; Briggs, 1976; Adelaar, 2007; Cerrón- Overt marking of information structure is oblig- Palomino and Carvajal, 2009; Yapita and Van der atory in Aymara. A sentence without proper prag- Noordaa, 2008). matic suffixes (or with marking that would destroy intersentential cohesion) is considered ill-formed. 3 Overt Marking of Information It should also be noted that the marking of infor- Structure mation structure is orthogonal to the morphosyn- tactic expression of evidentiality.3 As mentioned in the introduction, word order in Aymara is not used to express information struc- 3.1 Referentiality ture. As an example, consider the following sen- Aymara has overt marking of referentiality. The tences in English (syntax-configurational), Rus- notion of referentiality roughly corresponds to sian (discourse-configurational) and Aymara (sub- 2 script N marks contextually new, i.e. nonpre- We use the following abbreviations in the glosses: ACC=accusative, AG=agentive, AGGR=aggregator, dictable information): ALL=allative, BEN=benefactive, CAUS=causative, COM=comitative, CONJ=conjectural, DIR=directive, (1) FUT=future tense, GEN=genitive, HON=honorific, HUM=human, IMPER=imperative, INCMPL=incompletive, (a) Peter cameN INF=infinitive, LIM=limitative, LOC=locative, MIR=mirative, It’s PeterN who came (*Came Peter) NEG=negative, NPRED=nonpredictable, PAST=past tense, (b) Pëtr prišëlN PART=past participle, POSS=possessive, POSS1=1st person Prišël Pëtr possessive, POSS2=2nd person possessive, POSS3=3rd N person possessive, POT=potential, PROGR=progressive, (c) Pedrox jutiwaN or JutiwN Pedroxa QM=question marker, REF=referential, REFL=reflexive, PedrowN jutixa or Jutix PedrowaN SMPL=simple tense, TRGRDS=transgressive (differ- ent subject), TRGRSS=transgressive (same subject), 1See (Baker, 1996). VRBL=verbalizer 3Aymara has a three-way system of evidentiality: wit- nessed, knowledge through language, and inferred. 99 what Sgall et al. (1986) call ‘contextual bound- he thought that A had left or was about to leave). edness’. We follow Sgall’s (2009) terminology Nonetheless, the verb is nonpredictable, too, be- here: “[Contextually bound] items are presented cause B does not know what exactly happened (A by the speaker as referring to entities assumed to may have come back earlier or may not have left be easily accessible by the hearer(s), in the pro- at all). totypical case ‘given’. They refer to ‘established’ Note that -xa marks referentiality, not items, i.e. to those that were mentioned in the pre- known/given information, as illustrated in (6). ceding co-text and thus still are sufficiently salient, (6) Qharüru-x sara-:-wa or to the permanently established ones (indexicals, tomorrow-ref go-fut1 3-npred those given by the relevant culture or technical do- → “I will go tomorrow.” main, etc.).”4 For the majority of bilingual speakers, referen- The adverbial expression qharürux “tomorrow” tiality is optionally marked with the suffix -xa,5 is marked as referential because it is inherently ref- however for monolinguals it is done so more con- erential but there is no marking which would spec- sistently. There are also slight dialectal differ- ify if it is predictable or not (the verb is already ences. marked as nonpredictable and there can be at most For example, in (3) the verb is marked as refer- one NPRED-marker per clause, as explained in the ential because the event is known from the context next subsection).8 (the speaker supposes that the hearer knows that It should be noted the the REF-marking is priva- someone came, otherwise he would not ask). tive, i.e. the absence of -xa does not mean that the (3) Khiti-s jut-i-xa? entity is not referential. who-qm come-SMPL3 3-REF → 3.2 Nonpredictability “Who did come?” Entities are nonpredictable if they are ‘new’ to On the other hand, in (5) the verb is not marked the hearer (cf. the usual dichotomy of informa- as referential because it expresses an event which tion structure known/given vs. unknown/new).9 is apparently unknown to the hearer (since he has Overt marking of nonpredictability in Aymara is expressed surprise in (4)).
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