The [OV] accusative VP
The standard [OV] verb phrase is found only in the innovative Progressive verbal system, found in some five or six modern languages and characterized by accusative verbal proclitics, postverbal auxiliaries that agree with the nominative, and no case marking on any free (pro)nominal arguments. Configurationally, the accusative proclitics are in alternation with free accusative (pro)nouns; the explicit nominative argument is usually postverbal, post-auxiliary as well in Panare and Apalaí but pre-auxiliary in the Pemón subgroup. In Apalaí and the Pemón subgroup, free O nouns can only precede the verb, whereas in Panare O more frequently comes to the right of A, yielding the order o-V(Aux)AO.
The transitive forms are easily reconstructed as the same action nominalizers seen above (Section 2.1), followed by the postposition *poko ‘on, occupied with’. Thus, the accusative VP in the progressive is formed exactly like the transitive half of the Absolutive VP in the Partial Set II attributive source: the nominalized transitive verb is possessed by its notional O, then becomes the object of a locational postposition *poko, and the postpositional phrase is the predicate of a copular clause. The possessor becomes the O, the possessed nominalized verb becomes the new main verb, the nominalizer and postposition collapse into a single progressive inflection, and the copula and its subject become the auxiliary and nominative, respectively (also precisely parallel to the source of the English progressive). Examples (12a–b) illustrate the expected patterns in Panare and Pemón (Álvarez 1996), respectively.
What is curious is the absence of the parallel intransitive [SV] verb phrase. Here, the allomorphy of the progressive suffix helps to guide us. In all but one of the languages where the reanalysis is attested, the progressive inflection shows suppletive allomorphy depending on the transitivity of the verb: transitive verbs clearly take some modern reflex of the action nominalization followed by the postposition, *-rG poko; intransitive verbs show a different pattern, which reconstructs to *-no poko. In many languages of the Cariban family there exists a nominalizing suffix, reconstructed to Proto-Carib as *-no ‘infinitive’, which derives a noun that cannot be possessed at all (Gildea 1998:134). I illustrate with examples from Carib (Hoff 1968:201–2), where-no occurs on both transitives and intransitives, giving the semantic reading ‘the fact of being V-ing on a certain occasion’. The notional S is unspecified in (13a), the notional O in (13b).
When the infinitive is reanalyzed into a main clause verb, it does not bring with it any constituent structure to be reanalyzed as a VP, hence giving us a source for the lack of the [SV] verb phrase with intransitive verbs in the Progressive verbal system. As seen in Figure 5, the infinitive derives a nominal form that cannot be possessed, thus it stands alone as the object of the locative post position, with the sole reference to its notional S participant coming via the copula and its (external) subject, which become, respectively, auxiliary and nominative subject of the resultant intransitive progressive clause (14a)–(c).
The difficulty with the Progressive system is explaining why, when both source constructions existed side-by-side with transitive and intransitive options, the transitive was selected from the action nominalization source and the intransitive from the infinitive source (cf. Gildea 1998:201–2 for more on this conundrum). However, the syntactic source of the typologically well-behaved [OV] verb phrase is no longer a mystery. Note that the frequent occurrence of postverbal O in Panare is a later innovation, by analogy to a change which had already taken place in the Set I past-perfective clauses.
