Conditional constructions in A'ingae
Maksymilian Dąbkowski
December 2021
 

I describe and analyze conditional constructions in A'ingae (or Cofán, ISO 639-3: con), an indigenous language isolate of the Amazon. In addition to compositional and non-compositional properties, A'ingae conditionals have properties that straddle the line between the two extremes, reusing formal devices or reimplementing semantic distinctions which exist in other parts of the grammar. I provide a constructional analysis of the data and argue that it can accommodate the idiosyncrasies of A'ingae conditionals, while capturing the semantic and formal generalization at all the relevant levels. Finally, negative epistemic stance in conditional constructions is encoded using a similative morpheme. The primary function of the similative is to express qualitative comparison. I observe that comparison requires considering a distanced mental space. I argue that in distanced conditionals, the similative has undergone semantic bleaching to convey mental space distance only.
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Reference: lingbuzz/006349
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keywords: dabkowski, a'ingae, cofán, cofan, kofán, kofan, kofane, ecuador, colombia, isolate, endangered, amazon, amazonia, conditional, construction, grammar, antecedent, consequent, protasis, apodosis, same, different, subject, mental, space, negative, epistemic, stance, factual, neutral, counterfactual, afactual, distanced, valence, head, cxg, ground, grounding, similative, simulative, comparison, comparative, semantic, bleaching, quantitative, similarity, diachrony, change, maximality, diagram, compositionality, compositional, non-compositional, irrealis, reality, realis, tense, tenseless, switch, reference, tracking, premise, conclusion, predictive, epistemic, grammatical, metonymy, metaphor, semantics, morphology, syntax
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