The Bora connector pronoun and tail-head linkage: a study in language-specific grammaticalization

Abstract

The Amazonian language Bora systematically uses in narratives a special, paragraph-initial anaphoric “connector pronoun”. This pronoun helps to ensure referential coherence through agreement in noun class and number with an antecedent, whose referent is thematic in the new paragraph. Additional morphology in the connector pronoun specifies temporal, causal, and other relations between events. The connector pronoun is syntactically tightly integrated into the clause, where it may function as an argument of a verb or as the dependent element of a genitive phrase. Certain frequent forms of the connector pronoun are the basis for a number of lexicalized conjunctions. This paragraph-linking strategy parallels in a number of ways tail-head linkage systems, not only in its functionality, but also with respect to its diachronic outcome (discourse conjunctions). The fact that Bora grammaticalized nominal expressions in a paragraph-linking system (whereas verbs are the central components of tail-head linkage) is congruent with the general preference of Bora to use many noun phrases per clause, in contrast to tail-head linkage languages, where noun phrases are rarely used.