The mismatch of hierarchies in Movima

International audienceIt is generally assumed that in languages whose clause structure is determined by referential hierarchies, the argument that represents the higher-ranking participant in terms of animacy and topicality also has the privileged syntactic status (cf. Aissen 1999, Croft 2003, Filimonova 2005, Silverstein 1976, Zúñiga 2006). In Movima (isolate, lowland Bolivia), the opposite is true. Movima has a direct and an inverse transitive construction, and it is the argument that generally represents the lower-ranking participant that aligns with the single argument of an intransitive clause. Furthermore, only this argument is accessible for topicalization and relativization; to relativize or topicalize the argument that represents the higher-ranking participant, a detransitivizing operation is used. The restriction of relativization and topicalization to the argument representing the lower-ranking participant can be ascribed to the fact that less accessible referents, i.e., those whose identity is less easily retrieved from the (linguistic or extra-linguistic) context, require more specification through strategies such as relativization or topicalization. The privileged status of the lower-ranking participant can furthermore be explained by the similar syntactic behaviour of nouns and verbs and by the identical encoding of the nominal possessor and the higher-ranking clausal argument in Movima. In fact, direct transitive clauses be paraphrased as "X is Y's V-ed" and inverse clauses as "X is Y's V-er". From this point of view, all Movima clauses can be interpreted as intransitive, equational clauses with either a monovalent/nonpossessed or a bivalent/possessed predicate and only one single argument that is accessible for syntactic operations. The direct/inverse opposition is a strong grammatical reflex of the prototypical possessive relation, in which the possessor ranks higher on the animacy/topicality hierarchy than the possessed entity