Active and hierarchical marking in Nivaĉle

ALEJANDRA VIDAL

Portland

Congreso; 89th LSA/SSILA Meeting; 2015

Society for the Stdy of Linguistic Society of the Languages of the Americas

Nivacle (Mataguayan or Mataco-Mataguayan family,comprised also by Maká, Wichí and Chorote) is spoken by about 12,000 people inParaguay (Department of Boquerón and Presidente Hayes), 200 in Salta, Argentinaand 700 in Formosa, Argentina. The language, predominantly head-marking, showsa typologically interesting alignment of the person markers, displaying bothactive and hierarchical types. One the one hand, intransitive verbs follow a semanticsplit, by which the role of an intransitive subject is marked differentlydepending on whether it is conceived of as a semantic agent (A), or a patientor experiencer (P). For the most part, with transitive verbs the treatmentof the A and P is dependent on their relative ranking on a referential hierarchy.Whichever argument has the higher ranking (indicated by ?>?)  is indexed. At first sight the effects of  indexability hierarchy demonstrate that speechact participants (SAP) outrank non-SAP, and that some special forms are used whentwo participants, one acting over the other, are involved. On the basis of sentenceand text elicitation-data collected in Argentina, I argue that in Nivacle verbalparadigms show a number of idiosyncracies. First, for a few intransitive verbs,forms for coding 2nd and 3rd are identical (ne?echsham ?you raise/he raises (standsup?). Second, for the coding of 3rd A and P subject participants, unlikewhat is shown for 1st and 2nd person, more than twoparadigmatic forms are possible (3P: ni-yi- va- Ø-; 3A: yi-, va-; 3A:3P: yi-). Third, as for the personhierarchy, an exception is made in that both 1st and 2nd person can bemade explicit when 2A acts on 1P. The fact that both 2nd  and 1st person participants areindexed calls somewhat into question the relative ranking issue. In terms of genetic relations, Nivacle shares moretypological similarity with Maká than with Wichí as it exploits the distinctionbetween intransitive agent and patient subjects (Wichí is completelynominative-accusative). However, synchronically Nivacle also represents anexceptional development within the family, since it conflates a semanticallyactive with a hierarchical system.