Subordination in South American languages (review)

The past few decades have seen a growing recognition of the importance of insights from South American languages to our understanding of linguistic theory and typology. Descriptive work on the indigenous languages of the continent has expanded, such that a ‘linguistic black box’ (as Grinevald (1998:127) described the Amazon region) has now yielded high-quality studies of dozens of languages (including many authored by contributors to this volume), although many more still await investigation. Many of these languages reveal structures and categories that challenge our assumptions about what is linguistically possible (see Dixon & Aikhenvald 1999, Everett 2010).

The eleven papers in this volume are testament to the variety of means by which languages may realize subordination, and to the challenges they offer for our understanding of how a relationship between associated concepts may be encoded. While the mechanics of subordination—and its variability and even existence across languages (see Everett 2005, Nevins et al. 2009)—have long been of interest to linguists, South American languages’ realizations of the phenomenon have received relatively little attention beyond language-specific studies. This volume brings together papers focusing on languages from a diverse set of genetic groupings, in keeping with the striking linguistic diversity of South America more generally. Three of the largest lowland South American language families are represented—Tupi (Mekens), Jê (Mebengokre), and Arawak (Baure)—as are the smaller families Tacanan (Cavineña), Cholonan (Cholón), and Uru-Chipaya (Uchumataqu), and the isolates Yurakaré, Movima, and Cofán. Two chapters discuss Quechuan languages: Tarma Quechua and varieties spoken in Ecuador. The majority of the papers were presented at the Workshop on Subordination in South American languages, which took place in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, in 2007.

The editors’ introduction to the book offers a valuable synthesis and overview. The discussion notes the typological importance of South American languages’ approaches to subordination, and observe the challenges these presented to some of the first Europeans to tackle the languages’ grammatical intricacies, such as Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás in his sixteenth-century grammar of Quechua. In contrast to the languages of Europe, in many South American languages, subordinating conjunctions form ‘only a minor part of the grammatical machinery’ (7), whereas participles, gerunds, and derivational affixes play a much larger role in processes that may be understood as subordination.

In light of the range of grammatical resources available to South American languages, establishing a precise definition for what will be understood as subordination runs the risk of limiting the field too narrowly, as the introduction observes. While the ‘traditional’ view of subordination considers a combination of clauses such that one (subordinate) is a constituent of another (main), an exclusively syntactic definition is problematic for many languages: for example, where the dependency of one clause on another cannot be easily established. Alternative approaches to subordination consider grammatical markers of dependency, pragmatic assertion, or semantic symmetry between clauses (see also Cristofaro 2003); however, in many cases these criteria are not compatible. The cost of overly restrictive definitions, the authors argue, is the likelihood of losing interesting observations about how languages do encode concepts like volition or purpose. Instead, they advocate a view of subordination as a ‘gradable multifaceted concept’ (6), viewed from the perspective of canonical typology (Corbett 2005). This approach enables the definition of crosslinguistically relevant categories that incorporate an intermediate space, thus allowing for fuzzy boundaries between, for example, subordination and coordination. Accordingly, the introduction observes that the variety of strategies associated with subordination in South American languages may be organized into a broad three-way typology, involving the nominalization of dependent clauses, the combination of two more or less finite verbal structures, and the integration of predicative elements via multiverb constructions.

While nominalization is a common subordination strategy crosslinguistically, it appears to be particularly prevalent in South America, and occurs in both lowland and highland languages (see Dixon & Aikhenvald 1999:9). Participant nominalizations typically function as relative clauses, and action...