How to copy your neighbors’ ways: A cross-generational perspective on nominalizations in Tariana (original) (raw)

Blended grammar: Kumandene Tariana of northwest Amazonia

Abstract: Kumandene Tariana, a North Arawak language, spoken by about 40 people in the community of Santa Terezinha on the Iauari river (tributary of the Vaupés River, not far from the Upper Rio Negro, a major tributary of the Amazon), can be considered a new blended language. The Kumandene Tariana moved to their present location from the middle Vaupés about two generations ago, escaping pressure from the Catholic missionaries. The Kumandene Tariana intermarry with the Baniwa Hohôdene, speakers of a closely related language. This agrees with the principle of 'linguistic exogamy' common to most indigenous people within the Vaupés River Basin linguistic area. Baniwa is the majority language in the community, and Kumandene Tariana is endangered. The only other extant variety of Tariana is the Wamiarikune Tariana dialect (for which there is a grammar and a dictionary, by the present author) which has undergone strong influence from Tucano, the major language of the region. As a result of their divergent development and different substrata, Kumandene Tariana and Wamiarikune Tariana are not mutually intelligible. Over the past fifty years, speakers of Kumandene Tariana have acquired numerous Baniwa-like features in the grammar and lexicon. The extent of Baniwa impact on Kumandene Tariana varies depending on the speaker, and on the audience. Kumandene Tariana shares some similarities with other 'blended', or 'merged' languages — including Surzhyk (a combination or Russian and Ukrainian), Trasjanka (a mixture of Russian and Belorussian), and Portunhol (a merger of Spanish and Portuguese). The influence of Baniwa is particularly instructive in the domain of verbal categories — negation, tense, aspect, and evidentiality on which we concentrate in this presentation.

A Grammar of Tariana, From Northwest Amazonia

2003

This is a comprehensive reference grammar of Tariana, an endangered Arawak language from a remote region in the northwest Amazonianjungle. Its speakers traditionally marry someone speaking a different language, and as a result most people are fluent in five or six languages. Because of this rampant multilingualism, Tariana combines a number of features inherited from the proto language with properties diffused from neighbouring but unrelated Tucanoan languages. Typologically unusal features of the language include: an array of classifiers independent of genders, complex serial verbs, case marking depending on the topicality of a noun, and double marking of case and number. Tariana has obligatory evidentiality-every sentence contains a special element indicating whether the information was seen, heard, or inferred by the speaker, or whether the speaker acquired it from somebody else. This grammar will be a valuable source-book for linguists and others interested in natural languages.

The sense of Murui nominalizations [Nominalizations in the Americas, Aug 7, 2014]

Astonishing complexities of South American languages have been puzzling linguists for a long time now. One reason for this is the overall lack of linguistic data that has been impeding a detailed understanding of distinctive grammatical structures in the languages from this part of the world. One of understudied linguistic domains in South American linguistics is nominalizations. Nominalization has been much discussed for Tibeto-Burman languages (Genetti, 2011; Noonan, 1997); yet there is not much literature on nominalizations in Amazonia. This paper aims to provide a description of the forms, types, and functions of nominalizations in Murui (Witoto), a previously little described language from the Colombian part of northwest Amazonia.

Beyond nominal tense: temporality, aspect, and relevance in Tariana noun phrases

Beyond nominal tense: temporality, aspect, and relevance in Tariana noun phrases Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald Tariana, an Arawak language from Brazil, has nominal markers which convey temporal and aspectual information about the noun phrase. Besides nominal future, there is a distinction between completed and non-completed nominal pasts. The completed nominal past has three meanings — decessive ('late, gone'), temporal ('former'), and commiserative or deprecatory ('poor thing'). The latter is only applicable to humans and higher animates. The non-completed nominal past has a further semantic component of relevance of the state or property for the present time. The usage of the markers is governed by the principle of communicative necessity — in contrast to clausal, or propositional, tense-cum-evidentiality marker which are always obligatory. Having special means for expressing tense, aspect and relevance within a noun phrase — distinct from tense and aspect categories with clausal scope — constitutes a typologically rare feature of the language.

Nominal possession in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish: the role of animacy in the emergence of grammar

This study examines number agreement within the noun phrase in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish (PAS), and shows evidence for the existence of a previously undocumented morphosyntactic feature. In PAS, the possessed noun does not necessarily agree in number with the possessor pronoun, yielding the following possibilities: singular concord: su canoa; plural concord: sus canoas; and, number mismatch: sus canoa. The fourth logical possibility, su canoas, has not been attested. A usage-based approach reveals two findings with respect to the innovative construction. First, its distribution is impacted by gender and place. Second, the possessor pronoun has semantic restrictions: its anaphoric referent is highly likely to be not only multiple entities but also human. These results place animacy as a key factor in the emergence of the innovative pattern.

Noun classes in African and Amazonian languages: Towards a comparison

Linguistic Typology, 2004

Many Amazonian systems of nominal classification have been perceived as constituting a descriptive and typological challenge. The proposal presented here is to consider many of them as emerging noun class systems rather than as a-typical systems that defy integration within an overall typology of nominal classification, at the opposite end from the Niger-Congo systems on a continuum of grammaticalization. First the African noun class systems are reviewed, with an emphasis on the sociolinguistic context of their descriptions and on their common deviations from a prototypical image of them projected in the general linguistic literature. Then a recapitulation of various proposals of atypicality of the Amazonian systems is given, followed by the presentation of a typology of nominal classification systems that integrates the dynamic dimension of grammaticalization. The application of this typological framework is illustrated with a case study from the Miraña language of Colombia.

The Morphosyntax Of Nominalization In Wayoro (Tupí): A Preliminary Approach

Diadorim, 2017

This study aims to provide a preliminary account of the morphosyntax of nominalization in Wayoro (Tupian family), an endangered language which is situated in the state of Rondônia (Brazil). In this paper I describe some of the morphosyntactic and distributional properties of nouns and verbs. An additional objective of this paper is to examine the nominal and/or verbal properties of the constructions involving the morpheme {-p} 'nominalizer'. The data suggest that there are two kinds of constructions involving the morpheme {-p}: a lexical, or VP nominalization, and a clause nominalization. KEYWORDS: Wayoro language; morphosyntactic and distributional properties of nouns and verbs; nominalization RESUMO Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo fornecer uma abordagem preliminar sobre a morfossintaxe da nominalização em Wayoro (família Tupi), uma língua ameaçada localizada no estado de Rondônia (Brazil). Neste artigo, descrevo algumas propriedades sintáticas e distribucionais de nomes e de verbos. Outro objetivo deste trabalho é examinar propriedades verbais e/ou nominais de construções que envolvem o morfema {-p} 'nominalizador'. Os dados sugerem que há dois tipos de construções relacionadas ao morfema {-p}: uma nominalização lexical ou de VP e uma nominalização sentencial.