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In:Topicality and the Shaping of Grammar: New perspectives from lesser-studied languages
Edited by Enrique L. Palancar, Claudine Chamoreau and Anaïd Donabédian
[Typological Studies in Language 137] 2026
► pp. 60–100

Chapter 2
Establishing and navigating polysynthetic reference

 | University of California, Santa Barbara
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
An underlying question in linguistics is which aspects of speech might be direct reflections of cognitive factors and which might be mediated by the grammars of individual languages. One strategy for addressing such questions is to compare speech from different languages on the same topic, produced under similar circumstances. Here this approach is brought to the expression of topicality and reference in three genealogically and areally unrelated languages: Mohawk, Navajo, and Central Alaskan Yup’ik. All are head-marking, but they differ typologically in several ways, among them their pronominal distinctions, the semantic specificity of their verb stems, their alignment types, their basic constituent orders, and their clause-combining strategies. Not surprisingly, some matching patterns across the languages suggest direct cognitive effects. All show bulkier coding for less accessible referents and reduced or even zero coding for more accessible ones, and all show similar prosodic patterning in the packaging of information. But there are also differences. In some cases, existing structures are exploited to facilitate identification of referents, while in others, strategies aimed at facilitating of referent identification have apparently shaped different grammatical developments.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 2.The languages and the corpora
  • 3.Direct cognitive effects on the expression of reference
    • 3.1Substance
    • 3.2Prosody
  • 4.Some cross-linguistic differences: Managing accessibility
    • 4.1Pronominal distinctions
    • 4.2Verb stem semantics
    • 4.3Determiners
    • 4.4Constituent order
    • 4.5Clause combining
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Author queries
  • Acnowledgements
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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