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This study investigates the syntactic structure of Imbabura Kichwa, a Quechuan language spoken in the Imbabura Province of Ecuador, with a focus on the seemingly free word order in grammatical functions and discourse-semantic functions (i.e., topic and focus). We first provide the data and overviews of the non-configurationality and non-discourse-configurationality of Imbabura Kichwa. Then, we demonstrate that the underlying syntactic structure of Imbabura Kichwa is built up hierarchically based on the agreement of focus enclitics with clause types and polarity. Finally, we argue that the non-configurationality and non-discourse-configurationality are the surface realization of the movement from the underlying structure to the daughter positions of a non-projective category S.
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The Forms and Functions of Switch Reference in A’ingae
This paper examines switch reference (SR) in A’ingae, an understudied isolate language from Amazonian Ecuador. We present a theoretically informed survey of SR, identifying three distinct uses of switch reference: in clause chaining, adverbial clauses, and so-called ‘bridging’ clause linkage. We describe the syntactic and semantic properties of each use in detail, the first such description for A’ingae, showing that the three constructions differ in important ways. While leaving a full syntactic analysis to future work, we argue that these disparate properties preclude a syntactic account that unifies these three constructions to the exclusion of other environments without SR. Conversely, while a full semantic account is also left to future work, we suggest that a unified semantic account in terms of discourse coherence principles appears more promising. In particular, we propose that switch reference in A’ingae occurs in all and only the constructions that are semantically restricted to non-structuring coordinating coherence relations in the sense of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1911348
- PAR ID:
- 10441225
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Languages
- Volume:
- 8
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2226-471X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 137
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8020137
