A Reference Grammar of Kotiria (Wanano)

10. Clause structure

10 Clause structure This chapter describes the syntax of the Kotiria clause—in particular, the arguments taken by different categories of verbs and the prototypical grammatical and semantic roles associated with those arguments, as well as types of adjuncts. (Complement clauses and other multipleverb constructions are treated in chapter 11.) The identification of subjects is accomplished by a mixture of head-marking and dependentmarking strategies; the latter are discussed in §10.1. The basic types of intransitive and transitive verbs and the semantic roles associated with their core arguments are examined in §§10.2–10.3. Section 10.3 also discusses the semantics of differential object marking, and presents a cross-linguistic overview of the object-marking morpheme +re and a hypothesis about the development of +re as a multifunctional ‘objective ’ case marker. Ditransitive verbs, the semantic roles associated with their arguments, and the means used to code beneficiary and recipient objects are discussed in §10.4. The occurrence of oblique (locative and directional) arguments with stative and motion verbs and in constructions with verbs meaning ‘take’ and ‘bring’ is the topic of §10.5, while valence-changing verb serialization is discussed in §10.6. Locative, temporal, comitative and instrument adjuncts are described in §10.7. Table 10.1 gives an overview of the arguments and adjuncts that occur in simple clauses in Kotiria. Part A of the table shows the grammatical and semantic roles of the arguments (obligatory participants) prototypically associated with each type of verb as well as the main coding means used to identify arguments; part B of the table shows adjuncts. In Kotiria, eight semantic roles—agent, patient, experiencer, beneficiary, comitative, instrument, locative (goal and source), and temporal—are mapped onto a smaller number of grammatical roles: subject (S) and object(s) (O);1 oblique arguments; and locative, temporal , comitative, and instrumental adjuncts. The main coding means are agreement suffixes on verbs, for subjects, and case suffixes on nouns for all other arguments and adjuncts; word order plays a minor role. 1 The abbreviation S includes both subjects of intransitive verbs and subjects of transitive verbs. Given its nominative-accusative alignment, Kotiria marks all subject arguments the same way. 314 Chapter 10 TABLE 10.1. ARGUMENTS AND ADJUNCTS A. ARGUMENTS VERB TYPE: SEMANTIC ROLE OF ARGUMENT: intransitive stative patient nonstative active/motion perception/m.p. agent exp. transitive active agent patient perception/m.p. exp. patient complex agent patient rec./ben. loc.-goal nonprototypical trans. stative patient loc.-ref. trans. motion agent loc.-goal GRAMMATICAL ROLE OF ARGUMENT: subject object1 object2 oblique CODING OF ARGUMENT: agreement (+re) +re -pҁ+re B. ADJUNCTS SEMANTIC ROLE: locative temporal comitative/instrument CODING: -pҁ / +i (-pҁ)+re =~be’re NOTE: Ben. = beneficiary; exp. = experiencer; loc. = locational; m.p. = mental process; rec. = recipient; ref. = referential. 10.1 Subject agreement While subject nominals take regular lexical morphemes coding information such as number and class—e.g., ~dubi+a (woman+PL, animate) ‘women’ and ~badu+ro (husband-SG, animate) ‘husband’—it can be seen from table 10.1 that they bear no overt morphology marking their semantic roles. This is our first indication that Kotiria verbal syntax orients primarily to the grammatical rather than to the semantic roles of arguments (see, however §8.5.2 and §11.5 for discussions of the semantic roles of the subject in perfective constructions with wa’a and yoa). The table also shows that subject nominals also bear no morphology marking their grammatical role. Yet we can confidently identify subjects by examining other marking strategies in the language. Kotiria is generally a dependent-marking language; however, at the clause level, Clause structure 315 there is a mixed pattern combining head-marking for subjects (subject nominals induce cross-referencing morphology on verbs) with dependent -marking for other nominal arguments, which take case-marking morphology (see §§10.3–10.4). The distinctive morphology that appears on constituents such as adverbial clauses and verbal complements (see §10.1.2, as well as chapter 11) can be thought of as dependent -marking of those constituents as well. In other words, subjects can be identified, first of all, because they are generally the only unmarked nominal arguments in clauses, in contrast to other (case-marked) arguments (but see §10.3.1), and secondly, because they induce agreement morphology in verbal words or on dependent constituents. The remainder of this section presents Kotiria subject agreement in detail. Realis finite verbs are...