A multi-level approach to the diversity of Mojeño Trinitario nominalization strategies
Résumé
Mojeño Trinitario (Arawak, Bolivia) shows a very large repertoire of nominalization strategies, only briefly mentioned in Gill (1957) and Rose (2015). It includes : i) 9 dedicated nominalizing suffixes on verbs; ii) an unmarked strategy where a finite clause is simply preceded by a determiner ; iii) the use of a derivational suffix followed by a multifunctional classifier.
This talk offers the first detailed overview of the diversity of nominalization strategies at three levels of analysis (semantic, morphosyntactic and functional) on the basis of a corpus of natural and elicited data collected by the author in the field over 15 years (Author, 2018).
First, at the semantic level, this paper shows that the nominalizers not only distinguish event vs. different types of participant nominalizations (Comrie & Thompson, 2007), but also encode aspecto-modal differences, distinguishing for example generic, specific, habitual and potential patient nominalizations. The paper shows that unmarked nominalizations as well as nominalizations based on the derivational suffix and a classifier also encode either event or different participant nominalizations, depending on the context.
Second, at the morphosyntactic level, each strategy is measured in terms of its verbal and nominal features, i.e. negation, TAM, plural, order of arguments. This methodology allows to categorize the Mojeño Trinitario nominalizations depending on their level of finiteness, and to address the distinction between lexical and grammatical nominalizations (Comrie & Thompson, 2007; Malʹchukov, 2004; Shibatani, 2019).
Third, at the functional level, the distribution of each strategy is described in terms of whether it can be used as an argument (in all expected positions of a noun), the object of certain predicates (complement clauses), a nominal modifier (relative clauses), an adverb (adverbial subordinate clauses), or even as a main clause predicate, following the methodology in Lemus Serrano (2020). The competition between unmarked nominalizations and those marked with a nominalizer in similar functions is then discussed. Different constructions expressing the same semantics do not show the complementary distribution expected in terms of discourse cohesiveness following Givón (2015).
The results proposed for the morphosyntactic and functional levels are based on a database coded for the morphological and syntactic features of each nominalization strategy, for each of the functional domain in which they are used (reference, complementation, modification, adverbial). This methodology provides a systematic overview of nominalizations in the language, reveals generalizations both at the formal and functional level, and facilitates cross-linguistic comparison.