Introduction: word order typology and the Cariban family
The Cariban language family is well-known in the typological literature on basic word order due to Hixkaryana and a number of other languages which have been argued to have the typologically rare basic word order OVS (Derbyshire 1977; Derbyshire and Pullum 1981). Other synchronic Cariban languages have been argued to have the basic orders SOV, VSO, Absolutive-V-Ergative, and syntactically free word order. Certain subsets of clauses in certain Cariban languages have additionally been argued to be nonconfigurational (lacking a VP constituent). In this paper, I consider the comparative evidence for reconstructing some basic word order to Proto-Carib, and conclude that given the current lack of detailed information about the cross-Cariban grammatical patterns in question, we can do no more than reconstruct an OV verb phrase. Although this conclusion in itself is less than satisfying, the path to this conclusion leads through two points of theoretical interest: (i) When comparing word orders for the purpose of reconstruction, it turns out that “Basic Word Order” at the level of the entire language is an abstraction which does not reconstruct well (at least in Cariban, and probably in many other language families); in contrast, at the level of individual “cognate” constructions, constituency facts reconstruct quite well. (ii) Not all modern clause types are relevant for reconstructing the order properties of main clauses in the ancestor language — innovative clause types show distinct constituency properties, most of which easily reconstruct as constituency properties of their respective source constructions. These two points constitute the main theoretical contribution of this paper.
Since most of the modern clause types do not reconstruct as main clauses in Proto-Carib, knowing their historical constituency properties does not tell us anything new about constituency in Proto-Carib main clauses. The methodology which follows from these observations is thus (i) to identify all clause types which share a common origin and reconstruct order properties of each independently, and (ii) to determine which (if any) of the clause types attested in modern languages are reflexes of main clauses in the proto-language, and then restrict the database to these clause types when trying to reconstruct etymological main clause order. The main contribution of this paper to the typological database is the careful reconstruction of the different synchronic word order patterns to their Proto-Carib sources.
This paper is organized as follows: the remainder of Section 1 reviews the notion of basic word order, previous work on word order in Cariban languages, and previous historical work on pan-Cariban verbal systems. Section 2 recon structs the verb phrases of those innovative verbal systems which present a VP: the [SV/OV] “absolutive” VP (2.1), the standard [OV] “accusative” VP (2.2), and the typologically bizarre [AV] “ergative” VP (2.3).1 Section 3 reconstructs the lack of a VP constituent in another innovative clause type. Section 4 then turns to the modern reflexes of Proto-Carib main clauses, so as to reconstruct a Proto-Carib [OV] “accusative” VP, but only when the transitive subject is third person (4.1–4.3). A configurational position for S/A cannot be determined (4.4). Section 5 summarizes the findings and suggests the implications of the comparative Cariban word order scenario both for future studies of synchronic word order typology and for future efforts to reconstruct word order.
