Negative focus in Colonial Zapotec

The following example shows an interesting case of a preverbal negative focus in Colonial Valley Zapotec.  This is very much like what would occur in San Dionisio Ocotepec Zapotec in the same context.

Look at the part about 'no one can rise', where we get aca ru-ti benni zoaca chapi...

Here in SDOZ, we would have ru-te'ca biiny 'no person', where the /ru-/ prefix on the negative matches the animacy of the noun that follows.

More on negative fronting

In a previous post here, I talked about the negative fronting construction.   The following two (sexist!) examples show that in the texts a positive contrast with the particle ro'  often seems to be paired with a corresponding negative contrast:

Another interesting note -- previously, I was aware that negative fronting involved the following pattern:

Nuveé {NP|PP} [S...]   "It is not {NP|PP} that ...."


I can now add CP to the list of fronted elements, due to examples like the following:

1 Cor 4:14

1 Cor 7:35

So the revised constructional template for negative fronting is


Nuveé {NP|PP|CP} [S...]   "It is not {NP|PP|CP} that ...."

Causative constructions in Copala Triqui

The causative construction shows an unusual word order in Copala Triqui.  The normal order for these constructions is

[caused event]  'yaj SUBJ

Although the normal word order for Triqui is VSO, I do not think that causative constructions are ever in VSO order in natural text.  (The caused event clause, however, is in normal VSO order.)

The following passage shows a characteristic example.  (Note also that the aspect of the cause verb 'yaj typically matches the aspect of the verb(s) in the caused event.

Another similar example:

Far less common is the reversed pattern:

SUBJ 'yaj [caused event]

The examples I have seem to involve a causer subject that is fronted for some other reason, such as negation, or missing, due to relativization:

Another open question is the type of constituent the caused event may be.  In the examples above, it seems like a simple VSO clause.   But it is also possible for the caused event to contain some fronted material:

Here the caused event is [there:is:no illness [hit me]], where the noun chi'ii 'illness' has undergone the typical fronting to preverbal positions found with negative constituents.  (Maybe that is some sort of Focus Phrase?)

Triqui topic marking

In a previous post, I talked about uses of the Copala Triqui morpheme ro' .  One frequent context is when two phrases are being compared with each other. More searching through the corpus shows that the words ase vaa 'like' often precede and daj or danj 'thus, likewise'  is often between the two phrases.

The following example shows two clauses that are compared: "just as [Christ rose] ro', so [he will descend to the world'":

(We also see here that ro'  doesn't have to be attached to noun phrases.)

The next example compares what he (Cornelius) and his family did:

(We see here also that ro' is not necessarily preverbal.)

One more example of this from our Address to the Triqui People text:

A rather different use of ro' seems to be involved in a structure which is NP-ro' [V pronoun ...], where the pronoun is resumptive to the NP:

Here the element with ro'  "young people" precedes the verb "listen"  and is resumed with the pronoun nij so'.

(This example is also rather neat with its initial cleft structure; the pre-cleft element is the object of 'listen (to)', which is embedded under 'have the obligation'.)

But the following two adjacent sentences show that a phrase with ro'  does not necessarily require a resumptive pronoun after the verb.  It is hard for me to say why one of these sentences has a resumptive and the other does not -- a speculation is that most of the phrases with ro'  are definite and 'each one' is not very definite.  So the daa 'o 'o determiner doesn't usually show up on phrases with ro' + resumptive.  However 'each one of the authorities together with all of their councils' is considerably more definite.  So perhaps definiteness accounts for the difference between sentences (23) and (24) below?

Topic "gappiness" and group cohesion in English

In some our work for the IARPA program, we looked at the relationship between the structure of topic chains and group cohesiveness (as judged by external evaluators).  We found a nice correlation that works like this
a.) identify the noun phrases that have the most references (pronominal, synonyms, repetitions) and call them the meso-topics of the discourse.
b.) count the number of "gaps" in the chain of references to the meso-topic, where a gap is a turn without a mention.
c.) Plot the rank of the meso-topic chain against the gappiness of the topic.

We found a neat correlation like the following:

More on special discourse function constructions in Triqui

Copala Triqui has a lot of constructions that involve discourse-prominent constituents, but I do not have a very good understanding of what they all do and how they differ from each other.  I have recently been looking at the morpheme ro', which seems to be a kind of topic marker.  The constituent marked with ro' often precedes a cleft with me se.


In the first example, we have a sequence of two sentences.  The first tells the addressee (a man named Cornelius) to go find Simon Peter.  (In this context Simon Peter must be new, since the addressee has never met him.)  The second sentence refers to Simon Peter as so' 'he', followed by the ro' topic marker.  So ro' seems to refer to a previously introduced topic, perhaps highlighting it as a continuing topic for the following discourse.

The second example shows another possible use of ro', to contrast members of a set with each other.  So in this passage, the discussion is about two representatives --  "One of them is.... and the other one is ....".   In this context ro'  appears on both contrasted noun phrases.

Fronted phrases with maan in Triqui

I'm looking tonight at phrases with maan, which is rather inadequately glossed 'only' in my current lexicon.

The phrase preceded by maan is always (I think) clause initial and has some special discourse function -- maybe focus.  (I need to work out how it is different from the ro' topics, clefts with me se, etc...)

This topical phrase is sometimes a time adverb (either orá or tio, two words borrowed from Spanish, that mean 'time'):

It can also be a noun phrase.  In the following example, the cactus fruit with spines contrasts with the nice cactus fruits without spines which the rabbit threw in the previous episodes.

(This example also has preposition stranding in the fronted phrase)