Topics in Iquito Syntax: Word Order, Possession, and Nominal Discontinuity
Temas en la Sintaxis de Iquito:Orden de palabras, posesión, y discontinuidad nominal
Object Details
| Subject Language | Iquito |
| Language PID(s) | ailla:119522 |
| Title [Indigenous] | |
| Language of Indigenous Title | |
| Title | Topics in Iquito Syntax: Word Order, Possession, and Nominal Discontinuity |
| Language Community | |
| Country(ies) | Peru |
| Place Created | San Antonio de Pintuyacu, Loreto |
| Date Created | 2004 |
| Description [Indigenous] | |
| Language of Indigenous Description | |
| Description | Topics in Iquito Syntax: Word Order, Possession, and Nominal Discontinuity. Iquito (Zaparoan) is spoken by about 26 individuals in a small community located in Amazonian Peru. The community is called San Antonio de Pintuyacu and is located about 40 miles due west of Iquitos, Peru, along the Rio Pintuyacu. This thesis presents a description and an analysis of discontinuous nominal phrases, nominal morphology, possession, topicalization, and Iquito’s basic word order. These topics are much more inter-related than they first seem. Consider these two facts: 1) Discontinuous nominal phrases can occur as the direct objects of irrealis constructions but not the direct objects of indicative constructions. 2) The irrealis constructions typically have an SOV word order, while the indicative constructions have SVO. Therefore, a complete analysis of discontinuous nominal phrases ought to examine the effect that the different word orders have on nominal discontinuity. Furthermore, while I show that Iquito word order is underlyingly SVO, one can only arrive at this conclusion after first understanding the constituency of the Iquito noun phrase, including possession, the distributional idiosyncracies of nominal discontinuity, and the properties of various pre-verbal grammatical positions such as the topic. The thesis begins with a broad introduction to the Iquito language designed to give the readers a general understanding of the nature of the language, including short discussions on intransitive vs. transitive sentences, verb morphology, and SVO vs. SOV word orders. Then a more in-depth examination is made of the following topics: 1) noun phrases and nominal morphology, 2) possession, 3) nominal discontinuity, and 4) a reconciliation of Iquito’s two basic word orders. The sources for this research are the body of primary data collected by myself during the summers of 2002 and 2003 and consist of about 600 pages of hand-written notes, about 15 hours of recorded elicitation sessions, two short texts, and 52 pages of typed documents that provide a preliminary description and analysis of these topics. This thesis also makes use of some of the data collected by other researchers of the Iquito Language Documentation Project. This data consists of more audio recordings and about 250 pages of additional working papers that discuss various aspects of Iquito syntax. Finally, there are resources created with the mutual help of every researcher on the project, which are a 1400 word dictionary and a searchable electronic database of about 600 sentences. |
| Genres | Thesis Grammar |
| Source Note | |
| References | |
| Contributor(s) Individual / Role | Brown, Mark C. (Author) |
| Contributor(s) Corporate / Role |
Media Files
There are 1 objects in this resource| Object | File Types | Access Level |
|---|---|---|
| IQU003R001I001.pdf | application/pdf | 1 |
