The alignments of central arguments in transitive and mono-transitive clauses in Mapudungun

Abstract

The alignments of central arguments in intransitive and mono-transitive clauses in Mapudungun – language spoken in the southern regions of Argentina and Chile – have been previously studied by Díaz-Fernández (2006) and Zúñiga (2006). Their analysis led to different conclusions: the former concludes that the language presents a nominative-accusative construction, while the latter concludes that the syntactic construction is neutral. From the linguistic data documented in Argentina among Mapuche speakers from La Pampa (Fernández Garay, 2002) and Chubut (Díaz-Fernández, 2003, 2006), and those registered in the Ninth Region of La Araucanía, Chile (Smeets, 2007), it is possible to conclude that, besides the alignments considered by the authors mentioned above, we can observe other alignments specifically detected when considering the personal markers observed in the inverse system that this Patagonic language exhibits.