Individuation in Santiago Quichua: implications on the structure of the nominal phrase

JUANATEY, MAYRA

Foz do Iguazu

Congreso; International Congress of Americanists; 2023

Referential expressions in a language may vary according to the degree of individuation that thespeaker assigns to each referent mention (Lehmann, 2015). The speaker can assign a genericreference, which includes a whole species of elements under a concept, a non-specific reference,which indicates a subset or individual of the species whose identity is irrelevant, or a specificreference, which assigns an identity to a subset or an individual. This presentation explores the wayin which different types of reference are expressed in Santiagueño Quichua (ISO 639, qus; Quechua, Argentina). Using a text corpora as empirical basis, the analysis showed how the presence and combination between different morphology of the nominal phrase enables different degrees of individuation for each referential expression. The language displays a complex interaction between a differential object marking (Juanatey, 2022) and nominal suffixes and constituents, such as demonstratives, determiners, possessives and modifiers, according to the degree of individuation and the availability of the referent in the interlocutor’s awareness. In order to comprehensively explain the variations in the structural complexity of referential expressions in the language, it was also necessary to consider, on the one hand, other semantic and pragmatic factors, such as animacy/ empathy (Yamamoto, 1999), familiarity o identifiability (Lyons, 1999), indexability (Bickel, 1999), among others, and, on the other hand, syntactic factors, like the argument structure and the order of elements of the noun phrase.