Postpositions in Cabecar
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24201/clecm.v10i00.268Keywords:
event-oriented postpositions, participant-orinted postpositions, degrees of grammaticalization, enclitic, suffix, primitive postpositions, complex postpositions, relational nounsAbstract
Cabecar (Chibchan, Costa Rica) is rigidly left-branching at lower syntactic levels, including postpositions instead of prepositions. All functions of an NP except the absolutive are marked by a postposition. While the grammatical postpositions are unanalyzable, the more concrete ones, which adjoin peripheral participants, local, temporal and manner adverbials, may be primitive or complex. Almost all of the latter are based on relational nouns. Concrete postpositions may profitably be divided into event-oriented and participant-oriented ones; the latter mark their complement as a secondary predicate on an actant of the verb. The primitive postpositions are assessed as to their degree of grammaticalization according to a set of criteria. As a result, they are close to case suffixes, yet fall short of this target.
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