The syntax of OVS word order in Hixkaryana

• Published in: Natural language and linguistic theory Vol. 32; no. 4; pp. 1089 - 1104
• Main Author: Kalin, Laura
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer 01.11.2014; Springer Netherlands; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adjunct clauses; Children; Clines; Complements; Function words; Ge Pano Carib Languages; Grammatical clauses; Grammatical particles; Grammatical subject; Language; Linguistics; Morphology; Natural Language Processing (NLP); Philosophy of Language; Predicate; Social Sciences; Syntactic Analysis; Syntax; Theory; Verbs; Word Order; South America; Brazil; Carib; Agreement; Syntactic theory; OVS word order
• ISSN: 0167-806X; 1573-0859
• DOI: 10.1007/s11049-014-9244-x

In this paper I propose and motivate a novel syntactic analysis of Hixkaryana, a Carib language spoken in the Amazon in Brazil (Derbyshire 1977, 1979, 1985, i.a.). Hixkaryana displays basic/unmarked Object Verb Subject (OVS) word order, which is found in very few languages of the world (Dryer 2008). I argue that the syntax of Hixkaryana involves (i) head-finality in the A domain, but headinitiality in the A' domain, and (ii) raising of υP into the A ; domain. My analysis accounts for a constellation of properties in Hixkaryana, including the surface order of constituents (OVS), surface constituency (the object and verb form a constituent that excludes the subject), agreement (prefixal portmanteau morphology marking the person of both the subject and the object), and the position of clause-level particles (which are in syntactic second position except for invariantly post-verbal ha).