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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. 128–167

The development of the portmanteau verbal morphology in Ecuadorian Siona

A story of the formal merger of linguistic categories

| Leiden University

Subject marking in the Western Tukanoan language Ecuadorian Siona is part of a complex system of portmanteau morphology that also marks tense and clause type. This system shows a remarkable number of regularities that hint that it might be possible to tease apart these functions. Synchronically, it is problematic to posit distinct markers for each of the three relevant linguistic categories, but diachronically, it is likely that these categories were expressed by distinct markers. This article reconstructs the pathway of the formal merger of these three linguistic categories, comparing the expression of Ecuadorian Siona’s system to the expression of these categories in other Tukanoan languages.

Keywords: portmanteau morphology, clause-typing, tense, Ecuadorian Siona, Tukanoan languages
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Ecuadorian Siona, a Tukanoan language
  • 3.A synchronic description of the subject marking paradigms
    • 3.1Subject marking patterns and clause typing
    • 3.2Tense distinctions in the paradigms
    • 3.3Marking distinctions for different verb classes
      • 3.3.1Monomoraic verbs
      • 3.3.2The bound class
    • 3.4An interim summary
  • 4.Sound changes in Ecuadorian Siona
    • 4.1Lenition
    • 4.2Debuccalization of *p
    • 4.3Vowel assimilation
    • 4.4Reconstructed paradigms
  • 5.Reconstructing non-fused categories
    • 5.1Non-assertive and dependent subject markers as nominalizers
    • 5.2Reconstructing tense marking
  • 6.Summary
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 20 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.17003.bru
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