Reflexivity and Reciprocity in Tehuelche and Selknam (Chon Family)
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REFLEXIVITY AND RECIPROCITY IN TEHUELCHE AND SELKNAM (CHON FAMILY) Ana Fernández Garay 1. Introduction In this contribution, we examine reflexive and reciprocal events in the Tehuelche or Aonek’o БaБjen and the Ona or Selknam languages; the first of these languages is practically extinct, and the second disap- peared in the mid-20th century. Both were spoken in the Patagonia Region of Argentina. In section 2, the two indigenous groups and their sociolinguistic characteristics are presented; section 3 deals with the theoretical-methodological aspects; section 4 describes how both lan- guages are characterized in typological terms; in section 5, reflexive and reciprocal constructions in Tehuelche are described, while the same constructions in Selknam are described in section 6. Section 7 reconstructs the reflexive and reciprocal markers in Proto-Chon and offers some conclusions. 2. Tehuelches or Aonek’enk and Onas or Selknam The Tehuelches or Aonek'enk, also called Patagones, Chewelches or Chewelchos, inhabited the region between the Río Santa Cruz and the Strait of Magellan. The language was described when it was already nearing extinction. The linguistic material used for the analysis was gathered during fieldwork done between 1983 and 1995. The corpus consists of 50 hours of tape-recorded Tehuelche language data.1 The Onas or Selknam inhabited most of the Isla Grande in Tierra del Fuego. When Najlis described the language of this group, only two Onas who spoke with certain fluency remained; they were the investi- 1. The consultants were the late Rosa Vargas, Luis Cuaterno, Luisa Pascual, Andrés Saynol and Ramón Manchao, and María and Dora Manchao, who currently live in Río Gallegos, the capital city of Santa Cruz. 216 ANA FERNÁNDEZ GARAY gator’s consultants, along with a third and younger speaker who was less fluent (Najlis 1973: 1). These two languages, Tehuelche or Aonek'o ʔaʔjen and Ona or Selknam, belong to the linguistic family Chon, a term coined by Leh- mann Nitsche in 1913; the other languages in this family include Teushen, the language of the northern meridional Tehuelches (Casamiquela, 1965) who inhabited the area of Río Chubut and Río Santa Cruz, and Haush or Manekenk, also spoken in Tierra del Fuego, on the southeastern side of the island. Both languages are now extinct. 3. Theoretical and Methodological Aspects Reflexivity and reciprocity are directly related to the question of transi- tivity. Following the article published by Hopper and Thompson (1980), transitivity is no longer conceptualized as a property of the verb; instead, it is considered to be a property of the clause, one that depends on a series of parameters: the number of participants, aspect, punctuality, volitionality, kinesis, affirmation, mood, agency, affected- ness and individuation of the object. All of these affect the clause, in- creasing or decreasing the level of transitivity. Taking into account the parameters proposed by these authors, we will now examine the defi- nitions of reflexive and reciprocal events. In terms of the reflexive event, I will use Faltz’s definition (in Kemmer, 1993: 42): “Faltz defines universal ‘archetypal reflexive con- text’ consisting of a simple clause expressing a two participant predica- tion in which one participant is a human Agent or Experiencer and the other a Patient, and in which the two participants refer to the same entity.” One fundamental feature of the reflexive event is, then, the coreference between the subject and the object. In addition, the subject must be human or at least animate in order to be an Agent or an Ex- periencer. According to Kemmer (1993), in her well-known study of the ‘middle voice’, there is a difference between the direct reflexive event and the one which, having a marker similar to the reflexive, is consid- ered a ‘middle’ event. To distinguish these two types of events, Kem- mer refers to a crucial semantic feature that she calls the “relative elaboration of events”. This is a parameter through which reflexivity, reciprocity and middle voice events may be differentiated among themselves and which also allows us to situate them as intermediate .