Subordination in Native South American Languages by Rik van Gijn, Katharina Haude, Pieter Muysken (review)

This volume brings together eleven studies of subordination in languages representing diverse families and three different South American regions. From the Andes, we find chapters on Ecuadorian Quechua, Tarma Quechua, Chipaya, and the now extinct Uchumataqu (these last two both belonging to the Uru-Chipaya family), while the isolates Yurakaré and Cofán, as well as Cholón (also extinct, Cholon family), come from different foothill regions. The isolate Movima, Bauré (Arawak), and Cavineña (Tacanan) are spoken in the subtropical savannahs, and lowland Amazonia is represented by Mekens (Tupí) and Me͂bengokre (Jê). The editors rightly point out that although descriptive studies of South American languages have multiplied in recent years, the linguistic diversity of the region is still generally underrepresented in the theoretical and typological literature on subordination. This volume contributes to remedy in part this imbalance, focusing attention on the relations between clausal components of complex sentences—a grammatical topic that is not always discussed at length in basic descriptive works—from a selection of South American languages. (Some additional references on this topic might include Adelaar and Muysken [2004] and Aikhenvald [2012], which contain sections on complex sentences in Andean and Amazonian languages, respectively, the collections of articles edited by Facundes, Galucio, and Gabas [2006] on relativization strategies in Amazonian languages, and by Comrie and Estrada Fernandez [2012], on relative clauses in languages of the Americas.)

The introductory chapter of this volume is particularly helpful, as the authors provide far more than just the brief chapter summaries typically found in anthologies. They include important background discussion comparing different definitions of subordination and outlining some of the issues currently in focus, such as gradient views of coordination-subordination relations, and notions of balanced vs. deranked subordinated elements. They moreover point out that even though certain subordination strategies are commonly found in South American languages—these being derivational operations (in particular, nominalizations of various types), use of free or bound subordinators and switch-reference markers, and constructions involving auxiliary, serialized or compounded verbs—we still find great diversity in the ways individual languages use or combine these strategies. This discussion is essential and aids the reader to better contextualize each of the contributing studies (the typological overview in the chapter by Rafael Fischer and Eva van Lier and the definitions provided in the chapter by van Gijn are also quite useful in this respect), for, although linked by a broad common theme, individual chapters vary widely in terms of how the topic of subordination is addressed.

A few of the chapters provide general overviews of subordinating constructions in the focus language. Among these are Ana Vilacy Galucio’s presentation of sentential adverbial (nonargument, modifying) constructions in Mekens (or Sakurabiat, of the Tupí family). In this language, three types of modification—temporal-conditional, reason-causal, and purposive—are expressed by means of a basic postpositional phrase template composed of either a nominalized verb or a demonstrative pronoun and a locative or ablative case marker. The author additionally points out an alternate construction involving serialized motion verbs used for purpose modification and hypothesizes that the combination of demonstrative pronoun plus postposition is undergoing reanalysis as a connective. Astrid Alexander-Bakkerus’s general presentation of Cholón subordinate clauses shows that this language employs a similar strategy; however, Cholón’s morphological repertoire includes a large number of semantically specialized nominalizers, many of which can combine with an equally extensive set of case markers. Katja Hannß, too, provides a general outline of adverbial and complementation subordination in the now-extinct Uchumataqu (Uru), comparing it to its sister language Chipaya. Like Cholón, both Uchumataqu and Chipaya employ distinct suffixes to indicate specific adverbial relations and types of complementation, though the set of bound subordinators in the Chipaya repertoire is more extensive than that of Uchumataqu. As observed in Mekens, Uchumataqu also includes a multiverb construction as one...