Overview Of The Alignment Of Arawakan Languages

Abstract

This article compares the alignments of the languages from the Arawakan family, one of the largest linguistic families of South America; in other words, how these languages encode the arguments of intransitive and transitive predicates. It had been shown that most of these languages are characterized by split intransitivity, more precisely by what will be called nominative-absolutive alignment, where an intransitive predicate takes nominative or absolutive agreement according to semantic, pragmatic or morphosyntactic factors. Two major subtypes are observed. In the first, one set of person markers is lexically assigned to a particular intransitive predicate, while in the second, depending on non-lexical factors, a predicate can accept one set or the other. After providing some information on the terminology used, we focus on the different motivations and realizations of this alignment. We also point to other alignments like nominative-accusative or tripartite and the possible diachronic changes who could have led to their presence within the Arawakan family. The study is based on first and second hand data.