How to do words with 'things': Multiple grammaticalization from 'thing' in Tupi-Guarani (original) (raw)
1 GUARANÍ WORD CLASSES The verb-noun distinction is crucial in all varieties of Guaraní. This paper argues for this distinction on the basis of distributional criteria (person marking by two different sets of prefixes). In spite of this, however, it must be noted that both verbs and nouns may predicate. This typological feature allows for frequent switching from verbal to nominal syntax for the same lexical stem, as shown by a split system of pronominal object marking: we find verbal syntax (agent > patient) in the case of the 1, 2, 3 > 3 and 1 > 2 hierarchies, but nominal person marking in the case of 2, 3 > 1 and 3 > 2 hierarchy. In these latter cases, Guaraní allows for existential clauses formed by a nominal predicate and its pronominal adjunct. This specific syntax is what makes Guaraní different from other languages. As for adjuncts, Guaraní is characterized by two kinds of attributive constructions; they are called here external and internal attribution . Word classes other than verbs and nouns are (i) pronouns and (ii) a very small set of " adjectives ". There is no specific class of lexical adverbs. Paraguayan Guaraní, as most Tupi-Guaraní languages, has inherited the traditional distinction between nouns and verbs from the reconstructed Proto-Tupi-Guaraní language (Jensen 1998: 498–514). (Three examples of this will be presented in 2.1 and 2.2.) In Kamayurá, a Tupí-Guaraní language spoken in the Upper Xingu region (Brazil), verbs are characterized by a set of prefixes ( a-, ere-, o-, jene-, ore-, pe- ; Seki 2000: 65) which corresponds to the set Ia in table 4. Nouns show another set of prefixes ( je-, ne-, i-/h-, jene-, ore-, pe- ; Seki 2000: 61): see table 5. Asurini (Tocantins River, Brazil) distinguishes verbs (with prefixes a-, ere-, o(w)-, sa-oro(w)-/ara-, pe-) from nouns (characterized by se-, ne-, i-/h-, sene-, ore-, pe- ; see Cabral & Rodrigues 2003: XIII-XVII). The uniformity of these languages regarding the verb-noun distinction is furthermore supported by Emerillon (French Guyana): Rose (2011: 23–24) proposes an argument-predicate distinction instead of a noun-verb distinction, but the classes are established by the already well-known prefix sets ( a-, ere-, o-, si-, oro-, pe- for verbs; e-, de-, i-/-/t-, node-, ore-, pe- for nouns; Rose 2011: 26–27).