The Piaroa subject marking system and its diachrony
Piaroa, a member of the Sáliban language family, is spoken on both sides of the Colombian-Venezuelan border. Based on unpublished
fieldwork data for Mako and Piaroa and published Piaroa and Sáliba data, this article focuses on the Piaroa subject marking system
and its origins. I show that the subject prefixes and inner suffixes used in future tense were inherited from Proto-Sáliban and must
therefore have preceded the rise of the right-margin subject markers ‑sæ, -hæ and ‑Ø. Based on
comparative Mako data, I propose that these markers are old copular suffixes that entered the verbal domain through a nominal
predication construction whose use expanded to encode habitual aspect. This research not only constitutes an important
contribution to the description of Piaroa but also expands, within a Diachronic Construction Grammar approach, our understanding
of complex systems of person marking, the origins of multiple exponence, and the role of multiple source constructions in paradigm
creation.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Piaroa subject-marking strategies
- 3.Sáliban verb classes and subject-marking in Mako and Sáliba
- 4.Finding the source of the subj3 suffixes
- 4.1The Mako copular suffixes: ‑ts, -h, and ‑∅
- 4.2Cognacy of the subj3 Piaroa suffixes and the Mako copular suffixes
- 5.Reconstructing the three Piaroa constructions in Tables 10 and 14
- 5.1Construction 1: Present and past tense (singular feminine and plural forms)
- 5.2Construction 2: Present and past tense (singular masculine forms)
- 5.3Construction 3: Future tense
- 5.4Summary
- 6.Conclusions
-
Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
Abbreviations
-
References
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Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Rosés Labrada, Jorge Emilio
2023.
Beyond alienability: factors determining possessive classes in Piaroa.
Linguistics 61:6
► pp. 1447 ff.

Seržant, Ilja A.
2021.
Cyclic changes in verbal person-number indexes are unlikely.
Folia Linguistica 55:s42-s1
► pp. 49 ff.

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