Nonverbal predication and the nonverbal clause type of Mojeño Trinitario
Résumé
Mojeño Trinitario, an Arawak language spoken in Bolivia, makes frequent use
of clauses without a verb or a copula. These encode some of the most common
semantic types of nonverbal predication – equation, inclusion, attribution (as
understood by Payne 1997), but also typologically neglected types, like quantification
and temporality. Possession, existence, and two unattested semantic
types – motion-presentational and quantified existential, are actually encoded
in Mojeño Trinitario with verbal clauses and copular clauses. The non-copular
nonverbal constructions present a very regular morphosyntactic pattern, even
though they make use of predicates that belong to different classes (nouns, adjectives,
adverbs, numerals, demonstratives and prepositional phrases). These constructions
can be subsumed under a major clause type distinct from the verbal
clause type, and are characterized by a nonverbal predicate either juxtaposed to
its argument, or standing by itself if it is suffixed with a person index. Nonverbal
clauses share some properties with verbal clauses, like some of the inflectional
morphology (e.g. negation, plural, TAM), but they however neatly differ in
three respects – constituent order, argument indexing, and irrealis marking. In
conclusion, Mojeño Trinitario shows a nonverbal clause type clearly distinct
from the verbal clause type, and this draws a robust major distinction among
lexical classes between on the one hand, verbs, and on the other hand, non-verbs
(nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and numerals).