Abstract: Complement and adverbial clauses in Movima (unclassified, Bolivia) are referential phrases that function as main-clause arguments or adjuncts. Unlike main clauses, they are consistently overtly marked for person, tense, and lexical aspect. The reason for this typologically unusual property is that the referential phrases representing subordinate clauses are obligatorily possessed, that their predicates are derived by morphemes that distinguish between events and states, and that their determiner marks temporal deixis. Subordinate clauses therefore seem to display more finiteness features than main clauses, which is partly due to the cross-linguistically common referential character of subordinate clauses combined with the peculiar referential properties of Movima determiners and the low noun-verb distinction.
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-04-29
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot