With Jérémy Pasquereau and John W.W. Powell
Presented at the Workshop on Mesoamerican Languages, WCCFL 29, and Sinn und Bedeutung 26
Piipaash (Yuman) has what, at first pass, look like standard dependent definites (e.g., Balusu 2006;Farkas 1997; Henderson 2014). Looking more broadly we see that the dependent indefinite marker -xper- has a wider distribution than markers of dependent indefinites in other languages discussed in the literature. Moreover, this distribution introduces twopuzzles that we will solve in this talk by proposing a unified account of -xper- in terms of a novel kind of pluractionality that we dub dependent pluractionality. The core proposal is that in most previously discussed languages the relevant morphology marks an individual variable as dependent (i.e., the variable quantified over by a numeral or indefinite). In Piipaash (aka Maricopa), -xper- marks an an event variable as dependent. What is special about Piipaash is that a wide variety ofexpressions are verbal, including numerals, and have an event argument.