Alternative Configurations in a Non-Configurational Language

Marcus Smith, Linguistik Kolloquium Bielefeld

'O'odham (Uto-Aztecan) has been regularly described as a 
non-configurational language by many scholars since the early 80s.
Focusing mainly on the Pima dialect, I argue that the language is
highly configurational, once one expands the scope of investigation
beyond arguments and their grammatical roles. Changing the sequence of
words frequently has a morphosyntactic and/or semantic effect.
Configurationality matters for a wide variety of grammatical particles
(aspect, modality, negation, deixis, intensity, etc.) and how verbs
interacts with them. Arguments are partially ordered for scope and
discourse properties. However, the language is not globally
configured. That is, different configurational patterns can interleave
with each other with no syntactic or semantic effect.