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The influence of state-marking on word order and information structure in Kabyle and Siwi (Berber)

Berber languages are pronominal-argument languages, in the sense of Jelinek (1984): their verbs bear subject
bound pronouns with argumental (as opposed to agreement) status. Other pronominal forms cliticized to
verbs code patient and indirect object. Noun phrases are not obligatory, and their ordering is not fixed.
Additionally, some Berber languages (e.g. Kabyle (Northern Berber, Algeria)) have inflectional marking on
nouns, called state, while others (e.g. Siwi (Eastern Berber, Egypt)) don't.
As the state opposition has been shown to allow discrimination between postverbal lexical subject and object
in Kabyle (Chaker 1988, Mettouchi 2008), the first question is how does a Berber language that has lost the
state distinction, such as Siwi, discriminate between grammatical roles when those are expressed by nouns
? And since the ordering of NPs has been shown to code information structure (IS) functions (Mettouchi
2008 for Kabyle), do IS constructions differ in the two languages, and how?

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