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Article published In:
The Evolution of Argument Coding Patterns in South American Languages
Edited by Antoine Guillaume and Spike Gildea
[Journal of Historical Linguistics 8:1] 2018
► pp. 31–58

The Piaroa subject marking system and its diachrony

| University of Alberta
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 Based on unpublished fieldwork data for Mako and Piaroa and published Piaroa and Sáliba data, this article focuses on the Piaroa subject marking system and its origins.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.
Keywords: subject marking, Sáliban, Diachronic Construction Grammar, Piaroa, Mako, Sáliba
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
Published online: 20 July 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.16023.ros
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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. DOI logo
Seržant, Ilja A.
2021. Cyclic changes in verbal person-number indexes are unlikely. Folia Linguistica 55:s42-s1 ► pp. 49 ff. DOI logo

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