CLAUSAL COORDINATION IN TOHONO O'ODHAM: A DIACHRONIC AND SYNCHRONIC PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Coordination in Tohono O'odham, a Southern Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, is sensitive to the syntactic categories of the conjuncts. Clausal coordination can be marked by an overt prefix ku- which is the synchronic descendent of the Proto Uto-Aztecan obviative subordinator *-ku ~ -ko and shares numerous cognates throughout the language family. The distribution of ku- in the left periphery is similar to the polar question marker n- and the subordinator m-. However, other typological characteristics of Tohono O'odham (e.g., auxiliary-second word order) closely interact with these elements in the left periphery of the clause. Drawing from corpus sources (e.g., Zepeda (1983), Mathiot (1973)) and previous literature on functional elements in Tohono O'odham (e.g., Hale (1983), Bare (2015)), this work aims to analyze the available instances of Tohono O'odham CP coordination within a Minimalist framework. Thus, it will present a clearer picture of Tohono O'odham's left periphery, permitting, in turn, more precise research questions in the future. It will also present new challenges to our understanding of the extended projection of the Tohono O'odham verb, opening the door to a cartography of O'odham functional elements.