Saliency, animacy, and definiteness hierarchies in argument coding in Mapudungun (South America)

GOLLUSCIO, LUCIA; HASLER, FELIPE

Congreso; Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous languages of the Americas/Linguistic Society of America; 2017

Mapudungun shows a system of integrated inverse alignment (Gildea 1994) governed by a saliency hierarchy (1)based on both the inherent topicality associated with the status of each participant in the speech-act participant ranking and the discourse topicality associated with a proximate vs. obviative opposition (see also Kuno, 1976; for a bibliographic account of inversion in Mapudungun, see Zúñiga, 2006; Golluscio, 2010). This paper describes the different dimensions at play in the inverse system and probes the prevalence of the semantic and pragmatic features of the arguments over their syntactic functions and thematic roles, both in simple and complex clauses.In Mapudungun, the direct construction (2) is used when the agent is higher than the patient in the saliency hierarchy. In contrast, the inverse is triggered when the patient has greater saliency than the agent (3). As can be seen in (2) vs. (3), the verbal person-number suffix indexes the agent in the direct construction and the patient/recipient in the inverse construction. In the case of two third persons in interaction, discourse topicality (proximative/obviative) becomes relevant: the inverse construction is triggered when a new topic is introduced into the discourse and acts upon another third-person form (new 3→3) (see examples in Golluscio, 2010: 715). In addition, at sentence level, we propose that the selection of the direct or inverse construction in cases of 3 > 3 is determined by the position of the arguments in the animacy + definiteness hierarchies (Silverstein, 1976; Dixon, 1979; Comrie, 1979; Payne, 1993; Croft, 1995; Haude & Witzlack-Makarevich, 2016; Lehmann, ms.). When the third person agent holds a higher position in the animacy + definiteness hierarchies, the direct construction is triggered (4). When the third patient/recipient holds this position, it is the inverse construction that is used (5).The prevalence of the saliency, animacy, and definiteness hierarchies over the thematic roles and syntactic functions in Mapudungun is also reflected in raising constructions (Polinsky & Postdam. 2006; see also matrix-coding in Van Valin, 2005). In the case of complement clauses with cognitive verbs, the agent of the dependent clause which holds the highest position in the aforementioned hierarchies (1SG) rises to the main clause triggering an inverse construction in which it assumes a patient role and subject function (6). Thus, in the main clause theargument coding as subject in the inverse construction depends on the speaker?s assessment of the relationship of the arguments in terms of the cluster of saliency, animacy, and definiteness hierarchies addressed here.