Abstract:

This paper argues that the language isolate A’ingae, which is spoken in Ecuador and Colombia, encodes reality status in the nominal domain. It features the two accusative clitics =ma and =ve, which differ as to whether they present a nominal referent as real or not. The so-called accusative 2 clitic =ve marks p-arguments for irreality, whereas the accusative 1 clitic =ma marks p-arguments for reality. A difference is drawn between absolute (ir)reality status, which is evaluated with regards to the moment of speaking, and relative reality status, which is evaluated with regards to a different temporal reference point. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates that the accusative 2 clitic =ve is used in several other functions. These include the marking of the nominal argument in negative existentials, as well as depictive secondary arguments, resultatives and in a construction preliminarily labelled as purposives. These usages may be diachronically related to the expression of irreal p-argument and a tentative grammaticalization cline for this relation is presented.

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