Dependent pluractionality in Piipaash (Yuman)

Authors

  • Robert Henderson
  • Jérémy Pasquereau
  • John W. W. Powell

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2022.v26i0.1008

Abstract

Piipaash is a Yuman language spoken in Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community (SRPMIC) and Gila River Indian Community (GRIC), both of which are located near Phoenix, Arizona. This work, based on text and other secondary sources, presents a novel analysis of a pluractional affix in Piipaash. In particular, Piipaash has what, at first pass, look like standard dependent definites (e.g., Balusu 2006; Farkas 1997; Henderson 2014). Looking more broadly we see that the marker of such indefinites, -xper-, has a wider distribution than markers of dependent indefinites in other languages discussed in the literature. Moreover, this distribution introduces two puzzles that we will solve in this paper by proposing a unified account of -xper- in terms of a novel kind of pluractionality that we dub “dependent pluractionality”. The core proposal is that in most previously discussed languages the relevant dependent indefinite morphology marks an individual variable as dependent (i.e., the variable quantified over by a numeral or indefinite). In Piipaash, -xper- marks an event variable as dependent. What is special about Piipaash is that a wide variety of expressions are verbal, including numerals, and have an event argument.

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Published

2022-12-22

How to Cite

Henderson, R., Pasquereau, J., & Powell, J. W. W. (2022). Dependent pluractionality in Piipaash (Yuman). Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung, 26, 396–412. https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2022.v26i0.1008