Clause-level coordination and discourse continuity in Tohono O’odham
Enrico Higginbotham
January 2025 

Coordination in Tohono O’odham, a Southern Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, is sensitive to the syntactic categories of the conjuncts. Clausal coordination can be marked by an overt pre x ku- which is the synchronic descendent of the Proto-Uto-Aztecan obviative subordinator *-ku∼ -ko and shares numerous cognates throughout the language family. The distribution of ku- in the left periphery parallels that of the polar question marker n- and the subordinator m-. However, other typological characteristics of Tohono O’odham (e.g., auxiliary-second word order) closely interact with these elements in the left periphery of the clause. Drawing from corpus sources and previous literature on functional elements in Tohono O’odham, this work aims to analyze the available instances of Tohono O’odham CP coordination within a Minimalist syntactic framework and compare its semantic and discourse functions to its cognate mor- phemes throughout the language family. Thus, this work presents evidence in favor of an analysis of the Uto-Aztecan switch reference system that not only switches between subject referents but also plays a role in the event structure of the clause and discourse. In O’odham discourse speci cally, ku- surfaces as the rst element of the second clause at the boundary between two clauses in a shared narrative. In these frames, it signals an episodic shift. Usages of switch-reference linked to eventualities in discourse are commonly referred to as“non-canonical switch- reference” and can be accounted for by an implicature-based theory of switch reference.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008851 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	OA Intercultural Pragmatics, 2025
keywords:	minimalism, coordination, subordination, switch reference, left periphery, tohono o'odham, uto-aztecan, implicature, syntax
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