Accusative marking – Nominal mood in A’ingae

Abstract

This paper argues that the language isolate A’ingae, which is spoken in Ecuador and Colombia, encodes reality status in the nominal domain. It features the two accusative clitics =ma and =ve, which differ as to whether they present a nominal referent as real or not. The so-called accusative 2 clitic =ve marks p-arguments for irreality, whereas the accusative 1 clitic =ma marks p-arguments for reality. A difference is drawn between absolute (ir)reality status, which is evaluated with regards to the moment of speaking, and relative reality status, which is evaluated with regards to a different temporal reference point. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates that the accusative 2 clitic =ve is used in several other functions. These include the marking of the nominal argument in negative existentials, as well as depictive secondary arguments, resultatives and in a construction preliminarily labelled as purposives. These usages may be diachronically related to the expression of irreal p-argument and a tentative grammaticalization cline for this relation is presented.