Queixalós Francisco. Syntaxe sikuani (Colombie)

Paris: Peeters, 2000. — 447 p. — (Langues et Sociétés d'Amérique traditionnelle 7; Société d'études linguistiques et anthropologiques de France 382).The goal of this work is to describe the Sikuani sentence via its structure and the functions of the units which constitute it. The inventory of lexical and syntactic classes sets the framework for the subsequent study of the relations between arguments and predicate, which continues quite naturally on to valency changes. The syntactic class transfers, and particularly the mechanisms by which verbs nominalize, show quite regular and complex phenomena in the interplay between morphological, syntactic and semantic levels. On the other hand, subordination proper involves relative disparity in the mechanisms implemented. After having examined the forms of coordination and the types of sentences determined by different acts of speech, the study ends with the description of the grammatical tools which serve the speaker’s pragmatic strategies at the moment of “packaging” and “delivering” the contents of his message. Detailed attention is paid throughout the work to the grammatical effects of the semantic hierarchies of saliency.