Sobre auxiliares y (otros) tipos de verbos. Gramaticalización en dos variantes zapotecas de los Valles Centrales

Abstract

Auxiliary verbs are an essential subject of research and morphosyntactic debate in our understanding of human language. The present work considers different analyses from the literature and describes original data from Central Valley Zapotec that enrich this discussion. On the one hand, the autonomous hypothesis assumes that auxiliary verbs constitute a different category from that of independent verbs, while the main verb hypothesis proposes that auxiliary verbs exhibit a degraded behavior, without constituting a different category. In this work, we present an intermediate position: Based on data from San Lucas Quiaviní and Santa Ana del Valle Zapotec we propose a verbal continuum associated with degrees of grammaticalization. Main verbs have a complete morphology while that of the auxiliaries is reduced; the syntax and semantics of both are also relatively opposite; the former always have a subject (lexical or clitic) while the latter lack one. We will also describe verbs with intermediate characteristics.