Verbal derivation in Upper Amazonian Quechua: A preliminary Semantic Syntax perspective.

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2018-06-15
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nl
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The dialect of Quechua IIB spoken in the Peruvian regions of San Martín and Loreto, Upper Amazonian Quechua, exhibits both similarities to and differences from the dialects spoken in the direct surroundings. It has an SOV structure and a highly agglutinative morphology, using numerous bound morphemes attached to noun or verb stems to express a variety of grammatical features, like person, tense and aspect. A striking phenomenon in Upper Amazonian Quechua and other varieties of Quechua concerns the placement and possible order of these morphemes as well as the principles governing this order. Using the syntactic theory of generative semantics (Lakoff, 1971), Parker (1973) carried out an analysis of verbal suffix placement in Ancash Quechua, a different variety of Quechua. In this article, I provide an analysis for the order of indexation of various suffixes to verbal stems in Upper Amazonian Quechua. Different suffix orders change the scope of the suffixes and thus the interpretation of the sentence. For this analysis, I resort to the theory known as Semantic Syntax (Seuren, 2018), a syntactic theory based on the theory of generative semantics.
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Faculteit der Letteren