A comparison of verbal person marking across Tupian languages

Abstract

this paper explores the diachrony of the verbal person marking system across the large and structurally diverse tupian language family. i argue that the historical development of these different patterns are best informed by analyzing their synchronic distributions with regard to the current evolutionary hypotheses on the family. iNTRoDUCTioN Just as phonological systems and lexical inventories evolve over time in ways that can be indicative of the history that related languages share, so do grammatical structures. Historical morphosyntax examines both the development of a particular form in a language and the changes in its function. the phonological form of a morpheme can be reconstructed using reoccurring sound correspondences that occur systematically in the languages under comparison. the function of a morpheme can change over time through processes of extension and reanalysis (Harris;Campbell, 1995;Gildea, 1998) or through contact-induced structural change (Heath, 1984). With this in mind, the reconstruction of the function of a morpheme should be based on the distribution of structural patterns across a language family and informed by the presence of cognate forms in the various functions. the development of divergent pattern in the ways that different languages within a linguistic family express grammatical relations is one area that can especially benefit from a comparative approach to morphosyntactic diachrony. this paper explores the development of the verbal person markers across the tupian language family from a typological and historical perspective in order to provide insights into how the different forms and functions of these grammatical systems arose over time.the tupian language family shows a high degree of internal variation regarding the ways in which the obligatory participants of a clause, i.e. the arguments, are expressed on the predicate. Many of the tupian languages spoken in rondônia only index the absolutive (s/o) argument on independent main clause predicates. However, the branches primarily spoken outside of rondônia show a number of divergent patterns, such as the hierarchical marking pattern where only a single argument in transitive clauses are indexed depending on whether it is a speech act participant (sAPs; first and second persons) or not. some of these languages also display different classes of intransitive verbs that index their sole argument using different marker sets, and/or have developed portmanteau morphemes that index certain situations where sAPs act on one another. furthermore, other languages show marking patterns such as the indexation of only accusative arguments, as in Juruna, or the indexation of only nominative arguments, as in nheengatú.this paper first provides an overview of the tupian languages by presenting two classificatory proposals for the family and then examining the typological diversity that the languages display in their verbal person marking systems. this is followed by a brief outline of previous proposals on the historical develop...

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