Article published in:
The Evolution of Argument Coding Patterns in South American Languages
Edited by Antoine Guillaume and Spike Gildea
[Journal of Historical Linguistics 8:1] 2018
► pp. 31–58

The Piaroa subject marking system and its diachrony

| University of Alberta
Piaroa, a member of the Sáliban language family, is spoken on both sides of the Colombian-Venezuelan border. Based on unpublished fieldwork data for Mako and Piaroa and published Piaroa and Sáliba data, this article focuses on the Piaroa subject marking system and its origins. I show that the subject prefixes and inner suffixes used in future tense were inherited from Proto-Sáliban and must therefore have preceded the rise of the right-margin subject markers ‑sæ, -hæ and ‑Ø. Based on comparative Mako data, I propose that these markers are old copular suffixes that entered the verbal domain through a nominal predication construction whose use expanded to encode habitual aspect. This research not only constitutes an important contribution to the description of Piaroa but also expands, within a Diachronic Construction Grammar approach, our understanding of complex systems of person marking, the origins of multiple exponence, and the role of multiple source constructions in paradigm creation.
Keywords: subject marking, Sáliban, Diachronic Construction Grammar, Piaroa, Mako, Sáliba
Published online: 20 July 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.16023.ros
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