Determination, degrees of explicitness and referential status in Wichí (Mataguaya)

JUANATEY MAYRA; MÓNICA AMARILLA; VERÓNICA NERCESIAN

Congreso; International Congress of Americanists; 2023

This paper discusses the interaction between the structure of the noun phrase and the explicitness of referential expressions at first mention (referent introduction) and second mention (reference tracking) in discourse, based on the analysis of a textual corpus in Wichi (Mataguayan).In instructional texts, for example, the first mention of a referent is in the second actant position, while the second mention is in the first actant position, following, in a way, the theme/rheme organization. This implies that both mentions are explicit (regardless of the distance between them), though with different degrees of explicitness, which would fit to the typological hypothesis that new or recently introduced referents present a greater structural complexity of the expression (Ariel 1990). On this line, for Quichua Santiagueño (Argentina), it was shown that the firstand second mentions are expressions with a high degree of explicitness, and that in second mentions, some determinants can change the type of reference indicating a change of accessibility (+accessible) (Juanatey 2020). In addition, regarding the reference tracking, it was shown that Wichi does not have specific mechanisms in the global domain, nor does it have case, mandatory agreement, or grammatical gender; the strategies employed –pronominal indexing in the verb, impersonal forms, serial verb constructions, presence/omission of FNs– work secondarily to suchfunction (Nercesian 2006, 2011). Later, it was shown that this particularity is extensible to the Gran Chaco area (Ciccone & Nercesian 2015).In short, based on this background, the results of this study in Wichi provide new elements for a better understanding of the discursive function and the formal characteristics of determination in South American indigenous languages.