Relativization in Kawahíva
Wesley dos Santos, University of Texas-Austin and UW-Madison
In many languages of the Americas and Asia, relativization is described as consisting of a nominalization that modifies another head noun (Yap et al. 2011; Zariquiey et al. 2019). From this perspective, it follows that relativization in these languages is achieved by the adnominal nominalization itself, without any additional syntactic processes. In this talk, I examine similar adnominal structures in Kawahíva, an endangered Tupí-Guaraní language spoken in the Brazilian Amazon. I show that Kawahíva adnominal nominalizations exhibit the hallmarks of another distinct syntactic operation – relativization. For instance, the modified head noun may not be separated from the gap in the nominalization by an adjunct. This suggests that simply characterizing these structures as adnominal nominalizations is insufficient, at least in Kawahíva. Instead, I propose that these structures are best described as clausal nominalizations with an internal syntax akin to a relative clause (i.e., involving extraction).
References
Yap, Foong Ha, Karen Grunow-Hårsta & Janick Wrona. 2011. Nominalization in Asian Languages: Diachronic and typological perspectives. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Zariquiey, Roberto, Masayoshi Shibatani & David W. Fleck. 2019. Nominalization in the languages of the Americas. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
