Cosubordination and Copala Triqui’s Syntactic Causative

Copala Triqui (CT), a Mixtecan language, typically has a VSO order with sentence final complements. CT’s syntactic causative is atypical and has a complement initial order with mixed properties of canonical subordinate and coordinate constructions. Previous accounts of atypical clause linkage types argue these types have a mismatch between subordination and coordination at different levels of grammar. Other accounts propose atypical clause linkage types are cosubordinate, and contain an unembedded clause that is grammatically dependent on another shown through exhibiting operator scope and dependency. This paper takes a theoretically neutral approach and develops language-internal diagnostics for subordination and coordination in CT. The grammatical properties of CT’s syntactic causative cannot be accounted for through a mismatch approach because some levels of grammar are not clearly diagnosable as subordinate nor coordinate. Instead, this paper develops a cosubordinate analysis. This paper also documents the typological range of atypical clause linkage types.