Dissecting Alignment in South America: Hierarchical Cross-Referencing Systems in the Guaykuruan Languages (Van Gysel 2016)

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Autor:	Van Gysel, Jens
Data:	2016
Título:	Dissecting Alignment in South America: Hierarchical Cross-Referencing Systems in the Guaykuruan Languages
Detalhes:	Orientação: Leonid Kulikov & Mily Crevels Mestrado, Universiteit Gent, Faculteit Letteren & Wijsbegeerte

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The Guaykuruan language family consists of four living languages – Kadiwéu, Toba, Pilagá and Mocoví – and Abipon, which is now extinct. All these languages are (or were, in the case of Abipon) spoken in the South American Gran Chaco region, which extends from the south of Brazil, over the southeast of Bolivia and the west of Paraguay to the north of Argentina. The Guaykuruan languages have typically been described in the literature as belonging to the 'hierarchical alignment' type, an alignment system which is cross-linguistically rare, but well-represented in South America. Additionally, Toba, Pilagá and Mocoví are all known as active-inactive or split-S languages, whereas Kadiwéu has typically been seen as an ergative language.

The aim of the present thesis is to nuance these analyses, and come to a more detailed, fine-grained image of the alignment patterns found in the verbal cross-referencing systems in declarative main clauses of the Guaykuruan languages. The methodology used in this endeavour is twofold. On the one hand, I examine whether or not the Guaykuruan languages adhere to four characteristics posited in the literature as defining features of hierarchical systems: referential hierarchy effects, obviation, explicit direction marking, and the maintenance of transitivity in inverse scenarios.

On the other hand, I approach alignment from a construction-specific, person-by-person and morpheme-by-morpheme point of view. This makes it possible to express the alignment system of every grammatical person in a language in terms of subsystems which conform to classical nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive or other alignment patterns. By averaging the percentages of the alignment systems of every separate person for which these subsystems account, the total alignment system of a language can be calculated.

The application of this methodology to the Guaykuruan languages led to several interesting findings. Firstly, it was noted that Pilagá and Toba each have a number of morphemes which align [Sa, O] vs. [So, A], an alignment system not noted before in the literature on any language, as far as I know. Secondly, two continuums were found in the data. On the one hand, the geographical location of the Guaykuruan languages seems to be a reliable predictor for the strength of ergative and active-inactive characteristics. Both systems are strongest in Kadiwéu, the northernmost language, and diminish in strenght the further one goes to the south.

Hierarchical characteristics and accusative alignment, on the other hand, do not conform to this same continuum. There is still a clear divide between Kadiwéu and the three other languages, with Kadiwéu showing by far the strongest hierarchical effects and the weakest accusative alignment. The internal variation between Mocoví, Pilagá and Toba, however, corresponds to the Guaykuruan family tree rather than to their geographical location.

In the last part of this thesis, I propose that the geographical effects visible in the distribution of alignment systems in the Guaykuruan languages can be plausibly explained by recurring to language contact. In particular, it is not inconceivable that Kadiwéu maintained ergativity and hierarchical effects to a stronger degree than the three other languages because of its close relationships to a number of Arawakan and Tupí-Guaranían languages. The stronger presence of accusativity in Toba, Pilagá and Mocoví, then, I attribute to the influence they plausibly experienced from the Matacoan languages, and in particular Wichí. The accuracy of these posited areal effects is an interesting topic for further research, as is a possible explanation for the internal differences between Toba, Pilagá and Mocoví.

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