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(Anti-)cliticization in Mapudungun

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Abstract

This article describes the formal behavior of some elements found in Mapudungun (isolate, South America): a question particle, a postposition, and several 3rd-person markers. Framed in terms of current theories of phonological and grammatical words, the paper argues that a useful characterization of the Mapudungun elements under scrutiny should acknowledge (a) that clitics are interestingly heterogeneous regarding how different bound elements stand in paradigmatic opposition to each other, and (b) that some of these elements can be meaningfully be called anti-clitics (i.e., they are p-words that are part of larger g-words).

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Notes

  1. My own observations coincide with the ones presented originally by Adalberto Salas in Salas (1978) and later in Salas (2006:73–75). These are largely compatible with Smeets (2008:49–50), who also makes crucial reference to the right edge of the phonological word, but incompatible with Echeverría and Contreras (1965) (the sole source for e.g. Goedemans and Van der Hulst 2013), who describe a stress pattern centering on the left edge of the word.

  2. Aikhenvald (2002) lists these and other formal properties, as well as some functional properties, including segmental properties, degree of cohesion, combinability with other clitics, scope, and lexicalization.

  3. This particle (or its allomorph kam) also occurs in affirmative sentences, sometimes with a clear causal function (e.g. amulayan iñche, füchalu kam [I.will.not.go 1sg get.old.pcpl part] ‘I will not go, because I am [too] old’) and on occasion with a focus-like yield (eymi kam t en [2sg part only] ‘it is only up to you (sg)’) (Augusta 1916:76). A similar semantic connection is found in Germanic: High German denn and dann alternated more or less freely until the 18th century (now, denn means ‘because, than and also occurs as an interrogative particle, and dann means ‘then’). The German elements are cognates of English then and than, which also alternated freely until ca. 1700.

  4. The same am seems to occur in compound particles as well (as enclitic in chiam < chi = am and as proclitic in anta < am = ta and anchi < am = chi), but such elements, as well as their building blocks chi and especially tat a, are even more poorly understood (cf. Smeets 2008:335f).

  5. I am glossing over several details here, e.g. there is a homonymous adnominal plural marker pu, ina also occurs as a verb root meaning ‘follow, chase’, and wente and miñche are originally adverbs and used to cooccur with mew (see further down in the main body of text). See Augusta (1903:128f) for other prepositional elements.

  6. Mew is often omitted as syntactic licenser of location/source/goal NPs with motion or posture verbs.

  7. Smeets (2008:61f) labels mewmu as “instrumental case suffix.”

  8. Smeets (2008:99) hypothesizes *ə-n-che > iñche, *ə-n-che-u > iñchiw, and *ə-n-che-iñ > iñchiñ, where *n is the 1sg.ind marker (*n-ch > ñch), *ə is fronted (and raised) before ñ, and * che ‘person’ is equivalent to the current lexical item. In her view, the element *e in 2nd person pronouns “is [also] probably related” to inverse -e. I remain unconvinced (but agnostic) with respect to these proposed etymologies.

  9. See Zúñiga (2006:Chap. VII) for a detailed account of direct and inverse verb forms in Mapudungun.

  10. Augusta (1903:128f) treated such elements as equivalent to Spanish con ‘with’, i.e., as “prepositions.”

  11. Singular subject subjunctive inverses are 3→2sg pi-e-l-m-i-mew > pielmew (instead of *pielmimew), 33sg pi-e-le-mew > pieliyew (instead of *pielemew), and nonreduced 31sg pi-e-li-mew > pielimew. Nonfinite forms replace the mood-person-number sequence of finite forms with a nonfinite ending like -n, -el, -am, -lu, etc. It appears plausible to reconstruct the inverse nonfinite counterpart -etew of direct -el as *-e-et-mew, consisting of the inverse marker *-e, the nonfinite marker *-et (which appears as -el word-finally, by a general rule that precludes syllable-final plosives from appearing in the language), and the 3rd person actor marker *-mew.

  12. Eastern varieties of Mapudungun, which have mu as the default realization of the postposition, also have (m)u as the default realization of this marker.

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Zúñiga, F. (Anti-)cliticization in Mapudungun. Morphology 24, 161–175 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-014-9244-x

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