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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton September 5, 2011

Exploiting word order to express an inflectional category: Reality status in Iquito

  • Christine Beier , Cynthia Hansen , I-wen Lai and Lev Michael EMAIL logo
From the journal Linguistic Typology

Abstract

Iquito, a Zaparoan language of Peruvian Amazonia, marks a binary distinction between realis and irrealis clauses solely by means of a word order alternation. Realis clauses exhibit a construction in which no element intervenes between the subject and verb, while in irrealis clauses a phrasal constituent appears between the subject and verb. No free or bound morphology otherwise indicates whether an Iquito clause is realis or irrealis. Based on these facts and partially similar phenomena in other languages, this article argues that typologies of inflectional exponence should be expanded to include word order as an inflectional formative.


Correspondence address: (Michael, corresponding author) Department of Linguistics, University of California at Berkeley, 1203 Dwinelle Hall #2650, Berkeley, CA 94720-2650, U.S.A.
Correspondence address: (Beier) Cabeceras Aid Project
Correspondence address: (Hansen) University of Texas at Austin
Correspondence address: (Lai) Defense Language Institute

Received: 2010-06-29
Revised: 2011-01-29
Published Online: 2011-09-05
Published in Print: 2011-June

©Walter de Gruyter

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