Clauses as noun modifiers in Toba (Guaycuruan)

CARPIO, MARÍA BELÉN Y MARISA CENSABELLA

Comrie, Bernard y Zarina Estrada (eds.) A typological overview to relative clauses in languages of the Americas

John Benjamins Publishers

Lugar: Amsterdam / Philadelphia; Año: 2009;

This paper aims to identify, describe and explain the different coding devices of noun modifying clauses in a corpus of narrative texts in Toba. We expose noun complements and relative clauses together because, in some instances, they share the same subordinator morpheme. The subordinators found in the corpus corpus are related to the demonstrative class and to a component morpheme of the third person free pronouns. They are of three types 1) maZe; 2) ra [da], so, na, Ze, ñi, ka; 3) ram, som, nam, Zem, kam. The first is specific to relative clauses, but some members of the other two types may introduce relative clauses, noun and verbal complements. Despite the fact that the latter also introduce verbal complements, we will not treat them deeply in this morphosyntactic context.