Subordination in Native South American Languages

Download or read book Subordination in Native South American Languages written by Rik van Gijn and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2011-04-29 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In terms of its linguistic and cultural make-up, the continent of South America provides linguists and anthropologists with a complex puzzle of language diversity. The continent teems with small language families and isolates, and even languages spoken in adjacent areas can be typologically vastly different from each other. This volume intends to provide a taste of the linguistic diversity found in South America within the area of clause subordination. The potential variety in the strategies that languages can use to encode subordinate events is enormous, yet there are clearly dominant patterns to be discerned: switch reference marking, clause chaining, nominalization, and verb serialization. The book also contributes to the continuing debate on the nature of syntactic complexity, as evidenced in subordination.