Optional Case marking and topicality in Pesh (Chibchan)
Résumé
In Pesh (ISO 639-3 pay; Honduras, Chibchan), case marking of arguments is optional. While arguments are expressed more frequently without a case marker (86.7%), in this paper my goal is to explore the conditions under which an argument is flagged with case marking. The optionality cannot be explainable by morphological or syntactic environments. Based on a corpus annotated according to Givón's method (1983, 1994), which focuses on accessibility and topical continuity, I show that the majority of arguments that are marked by a case marker have given and persistent referents. These given arguments are coded as NPs or PROs marked by a case marker, contrary to what the authors write about the lighter codification of a given referent (Chafe 1976, Givón 1983, Krifka 2008).
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