Pragmatic structures in Aymara

Aug 1, 2013·

Petr Homola

Matt Coler

· 1 min read

Abstract

The paper describes overt marking of information structure in the indigenous Andean language Aymara. In this paper we show that although the word order is free, Aymara is not a discourse-configurational language (Kiss, 1994); instead, information structure is expressed only morphologically by pragmatic suffixes. The marking of ’topic’ is more flexible than the marking of ‘focus’ (be it at the clause level or NP-internal). Since overt marking of information structure is partial, this paper also devotes considerable attention to the resolution of underspecification in Aymara.

Type

Journal Article

Publication

Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (DepLing 2013)

This paper investigates the pragmatic structures of Aymara, an indigenous Andean language, with a focus on how information structure is marked. We challenge the traditional classification of languages with free word order as discourse-configurational (Kiss, 1994), demonstrating that in Aymara, information structure is primarily expressed through morphological means rather than syntactic positioning.

Specifically, we analyze how topic and focus are marked in Aymara through a system of pragmatic suffixes. Our findings show that topic marking displays more flexibility than focus marking, both at the clause level and within noun phrases. However, since the overt marking of information structure in Aymara is not comprehensive, we also examine how underspecified structures are resolved and interpreted in discourse.

This research contributes to the typological understanding of information structure marking across languages and provides insights into the pragmatic-morphological interface in Aymara. The findings have implications for linguistic theory, particularly regarding the relationship between morphology, syntax, and information structure in typologically diverse languages.

Last updated on Aug 1, 2013