| Summary: | Mazahua has traditionally been said to be a head-marking language; specifically, the grammatical subject is encoded in an index formalized in a proclitic. The purpose of this paper is to describe non-canonical subject marking. In this language, the non-canonical way the proclitic that paradigmatically encodes tense, mood, aspect, and person, in particular grammatical contexts, is realized as a zero, empty, or omitted morpheme.
The language presents additional grammatical resources to exhibit the grammatical subject, such as morphemes of grammatical relation emphasis, number, clausal closure demonstratives, and noun phrases. Several of these subject-encoding forms may co-occur in a clause. Information structure is a discourse property that is directly related to the identification of the subject encoded in a zero morpheme. The expression of the different types of topics allows to identify the reference of this discursive participant.
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