"Syntactic reanalysis, information load, and phonetic reduction in Akawaio(Cariban): I'mənə shrink that /mörö/"
In four Cariban languages (Akawaio, Makushi, Ye’kwana, Kari’nja), former pronominal subjects of historical predicate nominal constructions, such as the pronoun ‘mörö’ in Akawaio, still appear but no longer serve as subjects in a newly developed type of contemporary finite main clauses (MC). In fact, within these new constructions, the former pronominal subjects do not seem to carry any semantic meaning at all, and have even become optional. We investigate the properties of MC-‘mörö’ in the broader language system, notably comparing the structure of MCs with that of subordinate clauses (SC). It appears that, apart from the presence of MC-‘mörö’ in MCs and a SC-head in SCs, new MCs and SCs exhibit the exact same structure. MC-‘mörö’ and the postposed SC-heads thus stand in a neat paradigmatic distribution, allowing for a reinterpretation of MC-‘mörö’ as a simple MC-marker that retains no synchronic pronominal properties. Using the information theoretical concept of information load (Shannon, 1948), we argue that, due to its paradigmatic distribution and additional measurable subphonemic features in MC-‘mörö’’s context, the informativeness of MC-‘mörö’ itself is very low, leading to its apparent optionality.
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Development Neurocognition Disorders
Linguistic Diversity and its Sources
