Who Said Polysynthetic Languages Avoid Subordination? Multiple Subordination Strategies in Dalabon*

Abstract

Dalabon, typically for a polysynthetic language, only employs subordinate clauses with low frequency (less than 5% in the corpus surveyed). Despite this, it has a number of formally distinct subordinate clause types, which are described in this paper. Pronominal prefixes to the verb have special subordinate forms, possibly deriving from a reanalysis of comitative applicative prefixes as subordinate markers; verbs so marked are used for a range of subordinate clause functions. It is also possible to incorporate one verb form inside another, to add case suffixes (locative, temporal and purposive) to inflected verbs, and to employ bare verbs stripped of their (otherwise obligatory) pronominal prefixes. The existence of so many subordination strategies suggests that claims about the lack of subordination in polysynthetic languages represent statistical correlations, rather than categorical requirements, and that it is perfectly possible for polysynthetic languages to possess a range of subordinate structures.