Abstract
Abstract: This paper explores the diachrony of the verbal person marking system across the large and structurally diverse Tupian language family. I argue that the historical development of these different patterns are best informed by analyzing their synchronic distributions with regard to the current evolutionary hypotheses on the family. I apply a parsimony reconstruction model across the topology of two different classifications and compare the results with what is known from traditional historical linguistic work. This study is able to provide support for previous claims about the family and also generates a number of additional hypotheses about the intermediate stages of development of these patterns.
Highlights
Just as phonological systems and lexical inventories evolve over time in ways that can be indicative of the history that related languages share, so do grammatical structures
This paper explores the development of the verbal person markers across the Tupian language family from a typological and historical perspective in order to provide insights into how the different forms and functions of these grammatical systems arose over time
The analysis presented above allows for a refinement of our understanding of the developments that took place in the person marking system of Tupian verbs, among the expansionist group of languages
Summary
Just as phonological systems and lexical inventories evolve over time in ways that can be indicative of the history that related languages share, so do grammatical structures. While a reconstruction of the marker sets in Proto-Tupí is well beyond the scope of this article, it is possible to identify cognate forms and compare their grammatical function across the family based on previous work These differences are explored with relation to two hypotheses on the classification of the Tupian language family, and the changes discussed are modeled over these trees using a parsimony model for ancestral state reconstruction. QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF VERBAL PERSON MARKING PATTERNS Since Jensen (1998) and Gildea (2002) propose quite different indexation systems for the early stages of the Tupian family before the development of PTG, a logical starting place for a discussion on the development of this system would be to examine the observed distribution of verbal argument marking patterns in the modern languages.
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