Applicatives in TobaQom (Guaykuruan)

Abstract

Toba or Qom l’aqtaqa (T/Q) is a polysynthetic Guaykuruan language spoken mainly in the Argentinean Chaco region. It lacks morphological case marking and adpositions; instead, the role of the unmarked NPs is either specified by the lexical meaning of the verb or encoded via applicativization. There are twelve applicative verbal suffixes: five with a locative meaning, four with a goal/directional one, and three that encode benefaction, reception, and accompaniment, respectively. Whether valency-increasing or valency-re-arranging, applicativization introduces applied arguments as core P arguments (as seen in number agreement and constituent order patterns, as well as in topicalization and its consequences for coordination and subordination pivots). When used with transitive roots/bases, applicatives do not add a third argument but change the meaning expressed by the verb, allowing a different semantic role from the one specified in the verbal root/base. T/Q is a beneficiary-prominent language: whenever the speaker wants to highlight the benefit that a non-subject participant gets through the verbal event, that participant will be encoded as a beneficiary. Serial verb constructions seem to be the origin of applicatives, and the grammaticalization processes undergone by the latter—in coexisting stages of evolution—show plausible routes for pragmatic morphology.