Fluidity in argument indexing in Komnzo

Abstract

Abstract This article addresses the verb morphology of Komnzo, a language of Southern New Guinea. It provides a description of verb indexing in Section 1, which is followed by a corpus analysis of a small class of verbs. Komnzo verb morphology encodes transitivity by distinct alignment patterns in the verb morphology, which I call ‘verb templates.’ Templates encode participant constellation, e.g. transitive or ditransitive, as well as event structure, e.g. dynamic versus stative. The system allows for some fluidity as to which lexemes can be used in which template. In addition to the description, the main contribution of the article lies in an in-depth examination of the interaction between lexical semantics and the morphological structure in Komnzo. This article takes an empirical approach, which draws on evidence from a text corpus of over 12 h of natural speech and comprises more than 12,000 inflected verb forms.