Determiners and the development of grammatical nominalization in Nivaĉle

Abstract

Nivaĉle, a Mataco-Mataguayan language of the South American Chaco, exhibits right branching syntax often involving determiners. The determiners express visibility, proximity, existence, have temporal implications, and mark abstract referents and nominalized clauses. This paper proposes that headless relative clauses arose by using determiners in grammatical nominalization via an amalgam source construction, while a certain complement clause structure may have arisen by using a determiner as a cataphoric pronoun before a co-referent clause. As background for the historical argument, we first introduce the determiners and predicating versus referring expressions. We then discuss the role of the determiners in grammatical nominalization to create headless relatives, and then the complement clause structure headed by ka=. Employing comparative Mataguayan data, we propose historical scenarios that may have yielded the two constructions.