Triqui topics and the reversed copula construction

Another environment for the ro' topic marker in Copala Triqui is what I'm calling the reversed copula construction.


Regular copulas have the normal order

 Predicate copula Subject

 as in examples like the following:

The reversed construction instead has the order

  Subject copula Predicate


and the ro' topic marker often shows up on the subject here, as in the following examples:

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?

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)