Nonverbal predication and the nonverbal clause type of Mojeño Trinitario

Résumé En

Mojeño Trinitario, an Arawak language spoken in Bolivia, makes frequent useof clauses without a verb or a copula. These encode some of the most commonsemantic types of nonverbal predication – equation, inclusion, attribution (asunderstood by Payne 1997), but also typologically neglected types, like quantificationand temporality. Possession, existence, and two unattested semantictypes – motion-presentational and quantified existential, are actually encodedin Mojeño Trinitario with verbal clauses and copular clauses. The non-copularnonverbal constructions present a very regular morphosyntactic pattern, eventhough they make use of predicates that belong to different classes (nouns, adjectives,adverbs, numerals, demonstratives and prepositional phrases). These constructionscan be subsumed under a major clause type distinct from the verbalclause type, and are characterized by a nonverbal predicate either juxtaposed toits argument, or standing by itself if it is suffixed with a person index. Nonverbalclauses share some properties with verbal clauses, like some of the inflectionalmorphology (e.g. negation, plural, TAM), but they however neatly differ inthree respects – constituent order, argument indexing, and irrealis marking. Inconclusion, Mojeño Trinitario shows a nonverbal clause type clearly distinctfrom the verbal clause type, and this draws a robust major distinction amonglexical classes between on the one hand, verbs, and on the other hand, non-verbs(nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and numerals).