Chapter 10
Explaining the antipassive-causative syncretism in Mocoví
(Guaycuruan)
Among the polyfunctional valency markers, an
antipassive-causative marker is a rather typologically unusual
grammatical feature. This paper tries to explain the antipassive-causative
syncretism in Mocoví, a Guaycuruan language spoken in northeastern
Argentina, by examining the synchronic functions and the diachronic
formation of the valency modifier -aɢan. We propose
that both -aɢan antipassive and causative concentrate
on the subject activity and involve the backgrounding of a core
argument. These two functions, which are traceable to the formation of
-aɢan from the state/change-of-state
nominalizer -aɢa and the transitive verbalizer
-n, work in tandem with the syntactic constraint of having
only two core arguments per derived and non-derived transitive
clauses, which crucially allows for the -aɢan
reanalysis from causative to antipassive.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Linguistic family and typological profile of Mocoví
- 2.1Guaycuruan family and Mocoví data
- 2.2Nominal and verbal phrases
- 2.2.1Nouns and nominal phrases
- 2.2.2Transitivity and core arguments
- 2.2.3Bound person forms and transitivity
- 3.The synchrony of -aɢan
- 3.1The -aɢan antipassive
- 3.2The -aɢan causative
- 3.3The -aɢan-aɢan combination:
Antipassive + causative
- 3.4Other intransitive causativizers:
-aɢat and -aɢat-it
- 4.The -aɢan formation and its evolution
- 4.1The nominalizer -aɢa
- 4.2The verbalizer -n and its verbal
source
- 4.3The -aɢan evolutionary scenario
- 5.The origin of causative and antipassive markers beyond
Mocoví
- 6.Conclusions
-
Notes
-
Abbreviations and symbols
-
References
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