Dia: dijous 26 de gener del 2022
Hora: 12.00 h
Lloc: sala de reunions 52.701 - 7a planta edifici 52. Roc Boronat - Campus del Poblenou - UPF

Resum: 

Some indigenous languages spoken in Amazonia, especially Tupian and Macro-Jê, present a morphological alternation in a subclass of words between so-called contiguous and non-contiguous syntactic contexts (Schleicher 1998, Rodrigues 1990, 1999). This alternation usually goes hand in hand with the presence of two morphological classes, with one class presenting a prefix that indicates contiguity—a relational prefix. However, the analytical foundation of relational prefixes in Amazonian languages has been called into question, arguing that said alternation is an illusion caused by the interaction of obligatory person marking for a class of inflectional words and the phonological restrictions on onset clusters (Salanova 2011, Singerman 2021). In this talk I will draw from my own fieldwork on Panará (Macro-Jê) and Mỹky (isolated), two languages spoken in southern Amazonia (Mato Grosso, Brazil) that present theme-initial alternations akin to relational prefixes, to evaluate the predictive power of the competing approaches in the literature.

References:

Rodrigues, Aryon. 1990. Comments on Greenberg’s Language in the Americas from a South American angle. University of Brasília ms.
Rodrigues, Aryon. 1999. Macro-Jê. Em Amazonian languages, ed. R. M. W. Dixon and A. Aikhenvald. Cambridge University Press.

Salanova, Andrés Pablo. 2011. A flexão de terceira pessoa nas línguas Jê. LIAMES: Línguas Indígenas Americanas, Campinas, SP, v. 11, n. 1, p. 75–114.

Schleicher, Charles Owen. 1998. Comparative and internal reconstruction of the Tupi-Guarani language family. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin.

Singerman, Adam. 2021. ‘There are no “relational prefixes” in the Tuparí language: synchronic and diachronic consequences.’ Talk given at the Harvard GSAS Indo-European and Historical Lin- guistics Workshop.