The Panará clause and the emergence of polysynthesis in the Jê language family

Abstract

This article presents the syntactic reconstruction of the development of a highly synthetic morphosyntax in Panará, a Jê language spoken in Brazilian Amazonia. Languages of the Jê family present a characteristically analytic morphosyntax, with an ergative-accusative alignment split, and a templatic verb-final clause. Panará, while clearly a Jê language in all other respects, presents strikingly non-Jê morphosyntax, being polysynthetic, uniformly ergative, and verb-medial, differences which have often been attributed to external influences from a non-Jê language in an intense contact scenario. I lay out a diachronic reconstruction of an innovation of head movement of the verb to INFL, which in turn triggered generalized cliticisation of phrasal heads on INFL, leading to polysynthogenesis.