Referential Hierarchies in Morphosyntax: description, typology, diachrony - "The Movima inverse from a typological perspective"

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Nikolaus Himmelmann, since 3/2010
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2009 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 135453781

This IP aims at an in-depth analysis of the typologically apparently unique hierarchical alignment system of Movima, placing it in a cross-linguistic perspective. Movima is a linguistic isolate of lowland Bolivia with still approximately 250 fluent speakers, the number being rapidly decreasing. Most speakers are over 60 years old, and they are all bilingual (Movima/Spanish); apart from about a dozen of children in one distant community, children do not anymore learn Movima as their first language. In Movima transitive clauses, constituent order is determined by the place the nominal referents occupy on a referential hierarchy that involves person, animacy, and topicality. The semantic roles of the nominal constituents (NPs) are assigned through direct or inverse morphology on the predicate. One of the arguments of a transitive clause has the same formal properties as the single argument of an intransitive clause, the other one has different properties. Since inverse-marking reverses the semantic-role assignment of the arguments, the Movima system can be described as remapping inverse (cf. Zúñiga 2006).Strikingly, and unlike other remapping patterns that have been described so far, in Movima, the argument that patterns with the single argument of an intransitive clause refers to the participant lower in the referential hierarchy. Furthermore, this argument has a privileged syntactic status, as is reflected most of all in relativization. As a consequence, direct clauses, in which the higher-ranking participant is the agent and the lower-ranking participant the patient, pattern ergatively, and inverse clauses, which display the reversed situation, pattern accusatively. Since direct clauses can be shown to be pragmatically unmarked, Movima displays the relatively rare pattern of ergative syntax.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland, United Kingdom, USA
• Participating Persons: Professor Dr. Balthasar Bickel; Spike Gildea; Professorin Dr. Anna Siewierska (†); Dr. Fernando Zúniga
• Ehemalige Antragstellerin: Dr. Katharina Haude, until 3/2010