Diverse Scenarios of Syntactic Complexity

This paper shows how Yaqui has recruited the element bwe, a discourse connective of discontinuity (that is, a spoken discourse marker that introduces a topic-shift), in order to participate in the creation of two new interclausal connectives: the cause/reason adverbial connective bwe’ituk and the adversative connective bweta. I argue that these two interclausal connectives come from a recent formation process that combines the discourse marker bwe and linguistic elements associated with the stra