This thesis explores adverb distribution in Iquito, a Zaparoan language spoken byapproximately 25 people in the northern Amazon Basin of Peru. The syntactic distributions of Iquito adverbs correspond to four semantic classes: time, manner,epistemic, and an intensifier. Time adverbs have the broadest distribution, occurring before the topic of a topicalized sentence, between topic and subject, after the verb, and after the object of a transitive sentence. Manner adverbs have a similar distribution, but are not found before topic. Epistemic adverbs have an even narrower distribution, never occurring sentence-initially (whether the sentence is topicalized or not) and rarely occurring between topic and subject. The intensifier adverb has the most restricted distribution, as it only occurs before adjectives or other adverbs. These distributions can be used to classify "atypical" adverbs, namely infinitival verbs that are used adverbially. Furthermore, these distributions shed light on the phrase structure of Iquito. Adverbs are analyzed in the literature as adjuncts, and the allowable positions are explained either as the result of adjunction to different constituents (Ernst 2002; Iatridou 1990) or movement between adjoined positions (Cinque 1999). The pre-verbal positions of Iquito adverbs, particularly in irrealis and negated constructions, raise questions for these analyses. The data demonstrate that adverbs can occupy non-adjoined positions, namely the object position in an irrealis (SOV) construction and possibly negation, forcing a reevaluation of the current treatment of adverbs. The research also expands the existing documentation on Iquito. / text

Iquito, a highly endangered Zaparoan language of the Peruvian Amazon, exhibits a typologically unusual word order alternation that marks the grammatical category of reality status (i.e. the distinction between realized (realis) and unrealized or hypothetical (irrealis) events). This alternation is the only reliable marker of the category; Iquito does not employ morphology to mark the realis/irrealis distinction. While the word order of Iquito realis constructions is reliably SVO, the word order of irrealis constructions does not fall into one of the canonical orders. It is characterized by an element (X) intervening between the subject and the verb, resulting in the order SXV. In this dissertation, I provide a detailed description and analysis of the realis/irrealis word order alternation. Using data from both elicitation and texts that I collected while in the field, I describe the types of elements that occur in the preverbal position of the irrealis construction, determine what unifies these elements, and establish which element of the sentence will occur in this position and what conditions this choice. Relying on the available data for the other languages in the family, I examine the expression of reality status in these languages and discuss how reality status comes to be associated with word order. I also provide a survey of other languages exhibiting similar word order alternations and discuss how they compare to the alternation we see in Iquito, concluding that Iquito is an example of an “ideal” word order alternation because word order is the sole indicator of the grammatical category with which it is associated. / text