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Diverse Scenarios of Syntactic Complexity
Edited by Albert Álvarez González, Zarina Estrada-Fernández and Claudine Chamoreau
[Typological Studies in Language 126] 2019
► pp. 13–26

Switch-reference in Kobon and Haruai

Areal influences within Highland New Guinea

| SIL International
| University of California Santa Barbara | Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Kobon and Haruai are two neighboring unrelated Papuan languages with similar syntactic typology. Within the overall space of cross-linguistic variation, their switch-reference systems are remarkably similar, though not identical, for instance strictly tracking the referent of the grammatical subject. Kobon uses same-subject marking when the referent of the controller is properly included in that of the target, and also in the inverse configuration when both noun phrases are of the same grammatical person; different-subject marking is only used when the referent of the target is properly included in that of the controller and the two noun phrases are of different persons. Haruai has essentially the same system, but allows more variation to express subjective assessment of degrees of coreferentiality.

Keywords: switch-reference, Papuan languages, experiencer construction, overlapping reference, language contact
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Switch-reference in Kobon and Haruai: The basics
    • 2.1Switch-reference morphology in Kobon and Haruai
  • 3.Switch-reference in Kobon and Haruai: What is tracked?
  • 4.Switch-reference in Kobon and Haruai: Overlapping reference
    • 4.1Overlapping reference in Kobon
    • 4.2Overlapping reference in Haruai
  • 5.Conclusion and prospects
  • Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.126.01dav
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