Determiners and the development of grammatical nominalization in Nivaĉle

OTERO MANUEL; PAYNE DORIS; VIDAL, ALEJANDRA

Studia Linguistica. A Journal of General Linguistics

WILEY Online Library

Lugar: New Jersey; Año: 2021 vol. 75 p. 1 - 55

Nivacle, Mataco-Mataguayan language of the South American Chaco, exhibits rightbranching syntax often involving determiners. The determiners expressvisibility, proximity, existence, have temporal implications, and mark abstractreferents and nominalized clauses. This paper proposes that headless relativeclauses arose by using determiners in grammatical nominalization via an amalgamsource construction, while a certain complement clause structure may havearisen by using a determiner as a cataphoric pronoun before a co-referentclause. As background for the historical argument, we first introduce thedeterminers and predicating versus referring expressions. We then discuss therole of the determiners in grammatical nominalization to create headless relatives,and then the complement clause structure headed by ka=. Employing comparativeMataguayan data, we propose historical scenarios that may have yielded the twoconstructions.