A corpus-based analysis of referentiality in Mapudungun

This report presents the methodological guidelines as well as some partial results of the study of referentiality in Mapudungun, a language isolate spoken in Chile and Argentina with different degrees of vitality. Reference in discourse encompasses two basic operations: the individuation of the referents and their anchorage in the discourse. Our research is part of a wider project which seeks to identify the structural resources used by the languages in referential operations. We investigate a set of structural and semantic parameters of referential expressions as they occur in a corpus of Mapudungun texts belonging to different genres. Some of the findings may represent general patterns of reference in natural texts, while others may be representative of specific Mapudungun genres. At a methodological level, our research shows that it is possible to substantiate hypotheses on reference and on discourse structure related to reference by hard figures, to characterize text genres by measurable semantic and structural properties, and to discover new phenomena which demand an explanation.