Word-Order Variation in Wanano

Kristine Stenzel

Abstract for paper presented at
SSILA Meeting
Atlanta
January 2-5, 2003

This paper analyzes the regular occurrence of a typologically rare word order--OVS--in Wanano, a Tucano language spoken in Brazil and Colombia. Wanano, like a number of other Tucano languages, has been classified as having basic SOV word order, yet textual and, in particular, conversational data reveal a great deal of variation between SOV and OVS orders. Given the identification of other OVS languages throughout Amazonia, regular patterns of variation in yet another language family lead to two hypotheses: a) that there is a word order change in progress, with SOV representing the older order and OVS the innovation, and/or b) that the variation indicates a stable system of both grammatical and pragmatic word order functions.

This paper explores the second of these hypotheses through the examination of the frequencies, types and functions of subject elements in both pre- and post-verbal positions in both discourse types. It finds that Wanano employs a rheme-theme organization of information in which newsworthy information is placed early in the utterance and given information later on. While not discarding the possibility that a word order shift is indeed in progress, it shows that synchronic word order variability can be analyzed as a complex system of interacting word order functions.

Kristine Stenzel is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado and can be reached at Stenzel@Colorado.EDU.

Colorado Research in Linguistics - Volume 17, Issue 1 - June 2004