Linguistic areas, or Sprachbünde, can be described very broadly as geographical areas where a group of languages have become similar to each other because of prolonged contact between the speakers of the different languages. Numerous linguistic areas have been proposed over the years and all… read more
Nominalization (in different forms and guises) is one of the most common subordination strategies in South American indigenous languages. A frequently used nominalization strategy is to use case markers to indicate the semantic or structural relationship of the nominalized clause to the proposition… read more
Until not very long ago, switch reference was regarded as a marginal phenomenon found in a handful of lesser-known languages. An increasing number of studies of the phenomenon made it clear, however, that the geographical extent of switch-reference systems is rather large, spanning large parts of… read more
Switch reference systems occur in a number of languages spoken in a contiguous area in western South America, across language families, and even across macro culture areas (Andes and Amazon). At first sight, this is suggestive of contact-induced diffusion, but the different systems show rather a… read more
Yurakaré (isolate, Bolivia) has two constructions, both restricted to narratives, involving repetition of chunks of speech in the form of a dependent clause, marked for switch-reference. In the first construction, tail-head linkage, material from the previous sentence is repeated as a background to… read more
Yurakaré, an isolate language spoken in central Bolivia, makes extensive use of reduplication to form words. Three different types of morphological reduplication can be distinguished on formal grounds: complete root reduplication, partial prefixed reduplication, and partial suffixed reduplication,… read more
This volume is dedicated to exploring the crossroads where complex sentences and information management – more specifically information structure (IS) and reference tracking (RT) – come together. Complex sentences are a highly relevant but understudied domain for studying notions of IS and RT. On… read more
Yurakaré (unclassified, central Bolivia) has five subordination strategies (on the basis of a morphosyntactic definition). In this paper I argue that the use of these different strategies is conditioned by the degree of conceptual synthesis of the two events, relating to temporal integration and… read more
Kemmer (1993) argues that middle voice markers almost always arise diachronically through the semantic extension of a reflexive marker to other semantic uses related to reflexive. In this paper I will argue for an alternative diachronic path that has led to the development of the middle marker in… read more
Mixed languages are said to be the result of a process of intertwining (e.g. Bakker & Muysken 1995, Bakker 1997), a regular process in which the grammar of one language is combined with the lexicon of another. However, the outcome of this process differs from language pair to language pair. As far… read more
The linguistic category of irrealis does not show stable semantics across languages. This makes it difficult to formulate general statements about this category, and it has led some researchers to reject irrealis as a cross-linguistically valid category. In this paper we look at the semantics of… read more