Relative clauses in Quechua

Description, issues, and (preliminary) proposals

Carlos Molina-Vital

On Quechua

• Quechua is the name of a family of languages as diverse as the Romance language family.

• According to Ethnologue: – 46 varieties.– 10,098,161 speakers (although this seems to be a

very optimistic number. The population might be more into 5 or 6 millions).

• Contrary to popular belief, it is not “the language of the Incas.” It was widely spoken long before the Incas became a nation.

Classification

• The Quechuan language family has two types:– Quechua I: Spoken in the

Central Andes in Perú (Regions of Junín, Ancash, and Lima)

– Quechua II: This variety is divided in three branches:

• QIIA: Spoken in the northern part of the Peruvian Andes (severely endangered).

• QIIB: Spoken in Ecuador, Colombia, and the Northen Amazonic Region of Perú.

• QIIC: Spoken in the Southern Andes of Perú, in Bolivia, and in the Northen Andes of Argentina.

Some Characteristics of the Quechua Languages

• Word Order: SOV (not strict, but clearly preferred)• Agglutinatting language with high degree of segmentability (almost no

fusion) .• Wide use of derivational morphology:

– wasi (‘house’) + -cha (‘factive’) + -y (‘infinitive’) = wasichay (‘to build a house’) – Wasicha + -chi (‘causative’) + -y (‘infinitive’) = wasichachiy (‘to make someone

build a house’).• Pro drop language: both subject and 3rd person object can be omitted.

– ¿Runasimita yachankichu? (Do you know Quechua?)– Arí, yachani (‘Yes, I know it’)

• Flexibility in the distinction of parts of speech: the same stems can be used as nouns, verbs, or adjectives (and even adverbs), by using the appropriate derivational or inflectional suffixes.

– Mikhuy (‘to eat’) / Mikhuna (‘food’) – Chaya (‘arrival’) / chayay ( ‘to arrive’)– Kay (‘this’) / kaypi (‘here’)

Nominalization in Southern Quechua (IIC)

• In general terms, nominalizers are suffixes that derive a noun-like word from a verb stem.

• In Quechua, the main nominalizing suffixes are:

a. Agentive –qb. Perfective –sqac. Concretive –na

• In the following section, I’ll present the main uses of those suffixes besides the so called “relative clauses”.

Agentive -q• Derives a noun from a verb stem, whose denotation is the agent of

the event.– Chusay (‘travel’) chusaq (‘traveler’)

• With motion verbs, -q introduces the subject’s purpose.- Papa alla -q ri -sha –yku

potato harvest AG go PROG 1Pl.Excl.‘We are going to harvest potato’

- Hanpi –q –mi hanpi –q hamu –sha –n.cure AG EV cure AG come PROG 3‘The doctor is coming to cure’

• Although it might be a homonym, -q could be present in the habitual past conjugation, alongside the auxiliary kay (‘to be’).– Puklla –q ka -ni (‘I used to play’)

play AG (?) be 1SG

Perfective -sqa

• Tense marker for the pluperfect (reportative past): mikhusqan (‘he had eaten it’)

• Past participle (adj. use): Puquy (‘to mature’) puqusqa (‘fermented’)– Macha –sqa –s imaymana –ta

drunk PART EV many.things ACC

rima –yu –sqa –ni

speak INTENS PLUP 1SG

‘(They say that) drunk I said a lot of things.’

Concretive/obligative -na

• Added to a verbal root forms a more concrete noun:– Asiy (‘to laugh’) asina (‘thing worth laughing at’)– Kuchuy (‘to cut’) kuchana (‘knife’)

• As an obligative, it is part of a periphrastic conjugation.– Killa tukuy -ta Lima –man ch’usa –na -nku.

month end ACC Lima ILL travel OBL 3PL‘At the end of the month they have to travel to Lima.’

– Awa –na –y –mi ka –ra –n.knit OBL 1SG EV be PRT 3SG‘I had to knit.’

– T’anta ranti –mu –na –y –paq qulqi –ta quwa –y.Bread buy CISL OBL 1SG DAT money ACC give INF‘Give me money so that I buy bread.’

Summing up…

• -q: agentive suffix

• -sqa: perfective

• -n: obligative.– Tense/aspect functions?– Participial system?

Types of Relative Clauses (RCs) in Quechua

• RC’s are fairly uncommon in Quechua: in 20 hours of spontaneous speech, only 4 relative clauses present (Courtney 2006: 1).

• 3 kinds of “native” RCs: Headless RCs, Externally headed relative clauses (EHRCs), and Internally Headed Relative Clauses (IHRCs).

• EHRCs are more common than IHRCs. (Courtney 2006: 6)

Headless RCs

• The “headless” structure is actually a full nominal.

• However, verbal properties could be present instead of nominal ones:– In Ex. (4) has Juanpa in the genitive, the

possessor of the noun with the possessive suffix (nominal pattern).

– In Ex. (5) Juan, lacks any mark, which makes it nominative, and the agent of the verb rimay (‘to talk’) (verbal pattern).

Externally Headed Relative Clauses

• This are the “normal” RC’s.• EHRCs modify a noun head located in the matrix

clause. • Common wisdom, says that in SQ, the head is

linked to the RC through a gap.• Not true: gap is due to nominalization process.

– Ex. (5) “done entity” (non-agent nominalization with -sqa)

– Ex. (6) “doer entity” (agent nominalization with -q)– Ex. (7) and (8) “to do entity” (non-agent

nominalization with –na).

Participles vs. relative clauses

• Examples from Huallaga Quechua (QI) (Webber 1989: 283)

a. wañu –sha –ta die PART

ACC

• Uysha –ta tari –shka -: b. wañu –sha –n

–ta die SUB 3SG

ACC

a. I found the sheep dead.b. I found the sheep which had died.

Sheep ACC find PERF 1SG

IHRC vs EHRC

• (Not surprisingly) the Generative literature considers IHRC and EHRC to have the same meaning.

• According to Lefebvre and Muysken (1982) the pair (9) and (10) are accepted by all their consultants.

• However, there are opposite judgments about this pair.– Rikusqay warmata hamunqa (with the noun head

marked accusative with –ta)– Rikusqayta warma hamunqa (with the nominalized

form marked accusative with –ta).

Complications with Case Marking

• Calvo (1993: 211-212) claims: – Warma riqusqay hamunqa (IHRC with no

accusative mark) is accepted– (9) is rejected, while (10) is view as a clearer

construction.– His consultants tend to avoid Rikusqay

warmata hamunqa, and Rikusqayta warma hamunqa (which were alternatives for Lefebvre and Muysken).

The appositional solution

• Considering that the RCs in SQ are nominalized forms, then the combination of the head and the nominalized form is an appositional construction.

• Two questions left unsolved for IHRCs:– Why does the apposition takes place after the noun? – Why is the accusative suffix –ta in (9) placed in the

modifier rikusqayta (at the end of the whole nominalization), instead of in warma (the "logical object" of rikuy), which would produce warmata rikusqay?

Fixing the apposition through evocation (metonymy)

• IHRC can’t be appositions (in strictu sensu): only pre-nominal position is allowed for modifiers in SQ.

• They are full clauses (but not sentences) acting as nouns.

• Evocation is a semantic strategy: IHRC provides relevant information from whole event, and not just the participants, which is evoked through the meaning of the main verb.

• Ex. (13) (from Prof. Shibatani) provides a notion of the metonymic process.

A hint on evocation from Spanish

• ? Yo estoy bebiendo las naranjas que María exprimió. ( ‘I am drinking the oranges that Maria squeezed.’)

• ?? Yo estoy bebiendo las naranjas. (‘I am drinking the oranges.’)

• Yo estoy bebiendo lo que María exprimió. (‘I am drinking what María squeezed’).

Internal coreference?

• Remember that in Quechua a 3rd person object is readily available if not explicitly provided in the sentence (and there’s rich verbal agreement for subject arguments).

• Is there anaphoric reference from the 0 argument in the main clause to the most relevant argument in the IHRC?

Case and the structure of IHRC (1)

• Structure of the IHRC in (9): – [[[[warmaOBJ rikuV]VP –sqaNMZ] –yPOS]N

–taACC] –qaTOP]NP.• Cuzco Quechua speakers from Lefebvre and Muysken

accepting (9) could be considering warma-rikusqay as a nominal compound.

• This makes clause-like case marking (*warmata-rikusqay) impossible in its right place.

• -ta placed onto the complex noun for not a clear reason. • Cochabamba speakers (Ex. 11) could be considering the

nominalization more like a clause-like structure, therefore, they maintain the case marking in the IHRC, and also, in the whole construction.

Motivation for Case in IHRC

• The chaotic presence of the case marker in IHRC can be explained by the fuzziness of the nominalization: it combines verb-like properties with noun-like ones. And there’s a permanent struggle in the usage of the speakers.

• The extremely low usage of those constructions might be a crucial factor in the instability in the use of case marking.

Unacceptability of some IHRC

• Hastings (2004: 60): “Only DPs with no overt case marking can be internal heads.”– [ [Runa –(*q) hamu –q] ] –ta riqsi –ni.

erson (GEN) come AG ACC know 1SG• –sqa modifies a non-subject argument (or adjunct)

related to the nominalized verb.• Since case marking can't take place in the head noun in

CQ (as presented by Hastings 2004), then the instability of the case marking inside the IHRC follows– The most common role for the noun modified by a –sqa

nominalization is object, and if the noun modified departs from that role by becoming a more dispensable adjunct-like participant, then the nominalized constructions becomes more difficult to identify due to the absence of the case mark.

Nominalizations as verb arguments

• Are sentences using full clauses as nominal arguments (or adjuncts) in (24)-(31) the same kind as Headless RCs?

• The relevant contrast here is the use of the case marker.

What is needed now?

• What is the meaning differentiation between IHRC and EHRC?

• To what extent mixed categories (clause-like / noun-like) are used in SQ (as well as other Quechuan languages?

• Are sentences like (13) really acceptable (Calvo’s consultant’s disagree on that)? What were the elicitation methods? No one makes that clear (exception made of Courtney 2006).

• What kind of relative clauses from the accessibility hierarchy are possible with –q, -sqa, and –na?

• Even harder: the position of the case marker needs to be very carefully controlled in the elicitation / text recollection.