Ditransitive constructions in Mapudungun

GOLLUSCIO LUCIA

Studies in Ditransitive Constructions: A Comparative Handbook

De Gruyter Mouton

Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2010; p. 710 - 756

In Mapudungun, an isolate language spoken in southern Chile and Argentina, alignment in ditransitive constructions is manifested in recipient indexing on the verb. I document two underived ditransitive verbs (elun ‘give’ and mïntun ‘take away’) and very few verbs of physical and mental transfer which can function as ditransitives without modifying the root. The other three-argument verbs in the corpus are derived as ditransitives with applicativization. In the case of underived ditransitives, applicativization introduces a fourth participant related to the recipient’s personal sphere. I describe ditransitivization or the lack of it in five classes of verbs, taking into account: the valence pattern, the interaction with valence-increasing categories, the strategies in marking the objects, and the behavioral properties of their arguments in different syntactic scenarios. I show that Mapudungun alignment in ditransitive constructions is governed by a saliency hierarchy based on inherent topicality associated with the speech-act participant ranking and on discourse topicality associated with a proximate vs. obviative opposition. It thus exhibits secundative alignment in the encoding of ditransitive events. In both direct and inverse indexing, passivization, reflexive-reciprocals, and relativization the recipient is aligned with the patient but not with the theme. The lack of inverse marking in passivization confirms that the saliency hierarchy outranks the argument hierarchy in this language.