Insubordination and Finitization in Arawakan Languages

This article proposes a historical scenario for the rise of non-finite independent clauses in the Arawak family, one of the largest linguistic families of South America. The competition between finite and non-finite clauses as independent clauses and the supremacy of the latter is well documented in Americanist typology, especially by Castro Alves (2004) and Salanova (2007) on Jê languages and Gildea (2008) on Caribe and Jê languages. In this respect, the Arawak family is highly relevant, since we can easily find illustrations of each step of this diachronic process. I posit that the available data suggest five successive stages: a stage of finiteness, a stage of nominalization for subordinate clauses, a stage of insubordination, a stage of hegemony of the non-finite forms, and, finally, a stage of finitization.