Between parataxis and hypotaxis : the concatenation of sentences in zamuco

Early Romance languages were characterized by the syntactic phenomenon of "para-hypotaxis", often manifested in the concatenation of a proleptic subordinate clause with the main clause that followed. The latter could in fact be introduced by a coordinating connector, giving rise to structures such as: subordinator + dependent proposition + coordinator + main proposition. There has been much discussion about the origin of this structure, which achieves a kind of contamination between parataxis and hypotaxis, and which was already present in classical languages, notably biblical Hebrew. In our presentation, we show that Zamuco languages make almost systematic use of this syntactic structure. It must therefore be recognized that para-hypotaxis has a not-so-marginal role to play in linguistic theory, since its presence is not limited to any particular period or geographical era, but can manifest itself completely independently in different languages of the world.