Rosa Vallejos (University of New Mexico, Collegium de Lyon)
"Classifiers in Secoya (Tukanoan): degrees of lexicality and their morphosyntactic correlates"
This talk provides a first introduction to nominal classification in Secoya, a Western Tukanoan Language. It aims to demonstrate the central role of nominal classification morphology in lexicogenesis, reference building, and reference tracking in the language. The discussion begins with an overview of the general properties of nominal classification morphology, with an eye on the degrees of lexicality of the forms. The morphology to be discussed include markers that occur with derivational and inflectional functions at the lexical level, as agreement between head and modifiers within noun phrases, as agreement between arguments and the predicate in (multi)clause constructions, and as inflection in nominal predicate constructions. The analysis presented here is grounded primarily in text data, including personal narratives, traditional stories, and data elicited using visual stimuli.