Fluidity in argument indexing in Komnzo

This upload includes the dataset and the revised draft version for the article: "Fluidity in argument indexing in Komnzo" by Christian Döhler, Leibniz Centre General Linguistics, Berlin (ZAS) to appear in a special issue on "Lexical constraints on grammatical relations" in Open Linguistics edited by Pegah Faghiri, University of Amsterdam and Katherine Walker, University of Amsterdam

Published as: 

Döhler, Christian. "Fluidity in argument indexing in Komnzo" Open Linguistics, vol. 9, no. 1, 2023, pp. 20220201. https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2022-0201

Abstract: 

This article addresses the verb morphology of Komnzo, a language of Southern New Guinea. It provides a description of verb indexing in the first part, which is followed by a corpus analysis of a small class of verbs. Komnzo verb morphology encodes transitivity by distinct alignment patterns in the verb morphology, which I call “verb templates”. Templates encode participant constellation, for example transitive or ditransitive, as well as event structure, for example dynamic versus stative. The system allows for some fluidity as to which lexemes can be used in which template. In addition to the description, the main contribution of the article lies in an in-depth examination of the interaction between lexical semantics and the morphological structure in Komnzo. The article takes an empirical approach, which draws on evidence from a text corpus of over twelve hours of natural speech and comprises more than 12,000 inflected verb forms.

Keywords: 

verb morphology, indexing, agreement, split-S, fluid-S, lability, Papuan languages, Yam languages