When "you" and "I" mess around with the hierarchy: A comparative study of Tupi-Guarani hierarchical indexing systems

Abstract

This paper deals with the person indexing system of Tupi-Guarani languages. Past literature has claimed that the relative position of the arguments of a transitive verb on a supposed person hierarchy 1 > 2 > 3 determines what argument is marked on the verb and how. It is also commonly believed that the morphosyntax of individual Tupi-Guarani languages is very comparable. This paper surveys in detail the encoding of arguments on transitive verbs in 28 Tupi-Guarani languages. It shows that the prior assumptions about indexing in Tupi-Guarani languages either do not hold strongly, or need to be stated in more nuanced ways. The study also shows that these languages are not as similar morphosyntactically as is often assumed. Importantly, they display a great variation in the domain of local configurations (i.e., when the two speech act participants interact), the arguments of which are often encoded in a non-transparent manner. This leads us to reject the 1 > 2 hierarchy as operative in governing indexing in all languages of the group.