The position of independent verbs in Cariban: diachronic and typological issues
Keywords:
Cariban Languages, Word Order, Verb, Typology.Abstract
This work aims to present some diachronic and typological considerations about the basic word order in Cariban languages. We focus on verb position in relation to its arguments
that play the role of subject and object in independent verbal clauses. There seems to be some evidence that word order in proto-Cariban was SOV, also, there are evidences that the discursive use of different word orders, associated with morphological changes in descendant languages, produced rare morphosyntactic patterns. The patterns can be characterized by clauses in which the object occurs in initial position and the verb and its subject after that constituent (OVS).