Inflectional markers of sentential parsing

The present study demonstrates the existence in Wandala (Central Chadic) of two inflectional markers which, although they change the form of the word, are not word-formation means but rather sentence-formation means. While neither of the forms indicates any specific semantic relation, they both enable the listener to parse the sentence into units that can undergo further analysis and allow for inferences about a large number of semantic relations within the clause and within the sentence. The types of inflectional marking described in this study are unrelated to the dichotomy of head marking and dependent marking. Although this study is based on data from a single language, it has implications for the typology of coding means and for theories of clausal structures.