Coordination, coherence and A’ingae clause linkage

Abstract

This paper examines a particular type of clause linkage (‘bridging’) in A’ingae, an en-dangered isolate spoken in Amazonian Ecuador and Colombia.We propose a formalcharacterization of its meaning (to our knowledge the first formal account for any language)that relies crucially on two SDRT coherence relations: NARRATION and BACKGROUND.We motivate this characterization with textual data and elicited data from context-relativefelicity judgments, and propose to derive it from independently observable facts aboutprosody, coordination, and anaphora in the language