draft manuscript - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

A passive-like effect is achieved by treating the third-person pronominal subject pronoun (here Ra=
3sg.ms) as non-referential, so that the pronominal object (here muRa 3sg.ms), coreferential with
a full NP (here SiRa ‘name’), is the sole referential argument of the verb, mimicking a passive. No
other strategy is attested for expressing anything like passive voice in any of the Old Omagua texts,
and there are no morphological and or syntactic strategies for doing so in the modern language,
suggesting that the on-referenital use the subject pronoun in this case is an example of grammatical
creativity on the part of the contributors to the ecclesiastical text in question.
9.4 Linguistic Comparison of Catechism Texts
The goal of this section is to describe the differences between the Catechism Fragment and the Full
Catechism, focusing on the differences in the Jesuit contributor’s use of, and facility with, Omagua
grammar. This comparison demonstrates that although the two texts exhibit significant similarities,
there are also subtle but pervasive grammatical differences between them, strongly suggesting that
these two texts reflect contributions by at least two different missionaries to a common Omagua
text tradition. 379 Both texts reveal that the contributors had significant control over most areas of
Omagua grammar but that they had different strengths and weaknesses in their ability to deploy
certain aspects of Omagua grammar.
We examine the differences between the catechistic texts in the order that the differences occur,
but we can make a number of general observations about these differences at the outset, summarized
in Table . First, the Full Catechism exhibits two cases of ungrammatical ordering of prenominal
modifiers, while the Catechism Fragment exhibits no such cases. However, various phenomena
involved in question formation are better handled in the Full Catechism. For example the distribution
of interrogative clitics and the use of wh-words distinguishing between reason or purpose
interrogatives are both handled correctly in the in the Full Catechism.
Both texts also show heavy use of the adverb 1m1nua ‘long ago’ to express past temporal reference,
in the apparent absence of a grammatical morpheme to express past tense as such, in a manner
that was probably quite unusual for natively spoken Omagua in that period. The Full Catechism
also exhibits ungrammatical placement of this word, a temporal adverb, between a verb and its
complement.
Note that the example passages in this section, which are copied from Chapters 5 & 6, are
reduced to a three-line interlinear format (phonemic representation, interlinearization and target
gloss) in this section, with passages from the Catechism Fragment preceding their counterparts in
the Full Catechism. Portions of the passages being discussed and compared are in bold face and
parenthetical notes refer the reader to the location of the corresponding five-line interlinear versions.
1st Question-Response Pair The translations of ‘tell’ in the question differ in (9.20a) and
(9.21a), with ikuata, literally ‘teach’, chosen in the former and kumesa ‘say’ in the latter. Note that
it is ungrammatical for theme argument of ikuata to be realized as an oblique (licensed here by the
postposition =supe goal), while it is required that the recipient argument of kumesa ‘say’ (i.e., the
hearer) be realized as an oblique, as it correctly is in (9.21a) (see footnote 153). In this case, then,
the Catechism Fragment exhibits an apparent grammatical error not found in the Full Catechism
(9.20) a. ikuata epe tasupe, amititipa Dios?
ikua -ta epe ta= =supe amiti =tipa Dios
know -caus 2pl 1sg.ms= =goal exst =interr God
379 See §3.2 for a discussion of orthographic differences between the texts.
142