Amazonian LanguagesDay 2: Arawakan Languages

Lev Michael, UC Berkeley

LSA Linguistic Institute, 10 July 2015

Today: Arawakan Languages

• Classification

• Verbal person marking and alignment

• Nominal Possession

• Attributive and Privative

Arawakan classification: Delimiting the family

• The Arawakan family was first proposed by the Jesuit FillipoGilii in 1782, four years before Sir William Jones articulatedhis influential Indo-European hypothesis.

• He based his conclusions on the similarities between Maipure(Venezuela, in 19th century), a language with which he wasfamiliar, and Mojeno, a language of Bolivia, whose speakers hiscolleagues were missionizing.

• Delimitation of the Arawakan family proceeded in a perfectlyempirical and rational manner, until the long-distancerelationship craze of the mid-20th centuries.

• This lead to weakly supported hypotheses regarding the extentof family, which we can call the Macro-Arawakanhypothesis.

• No end of confusion has been generated by the fact that thismore speculative grouping was often called ‘Arawakan’.

• Language families and isolates incorporated into theMacro-Arawakan hypothesis include:

• Arawan• Guahiboan• Harakmbet• Candoshi• Pukina

• More cautious minds were skeptical of this larger group, andwanted a way to refer to the core group of languages whoserelatedness was not in doubt.

• In an effort to avoid the confusion generated by the use of theterm ‘Arawakan’ by long-distance enthusiasts, two alternativesarose for the core group of languages.

• ‘Maipurean’ (= ‘Maipuran’), favored by Payne (1991) andCampbell (1997) among others

• ‘Arawak’, championed by Aikhenvald (1999), among others

• Maipurean has not really caught on, with ‘Arawakan’ and‘Arawak’ being the most commonly used.

• The result is rather confusing, since there are two sets ofusages:

• Usage 1: ‘Arawak’ (core group), ‘Arawakan’ (speculative largergroup)

• ‘Arawak’ is more compatible with the way Latin Americanlinguists name language families, but less so withEnglish-based conventions.

• The fact that two quite different classification hypotheses aredistinguished by the presence of -an is rather unfortunate

• Usage 2: ‘Arawakan’ (core group), ‘Macro-Arawakan’(speculative larger group)

• This usage seems in almost all ways clearer.

The major classifications

• The major classifications of the family include:• ‘Guru’ classifications

• Campbell (1997) [≈ Kaufman (1994)], Aikhenvald (1999)

• Distance methods classifications• Payne (1991), Ramirez (2001)

• Phylogenetic methods classifications• Walker and Ribeiro (2011)

• Under optimal circumstances, we would probably rank thereliability of these methods as follows:

(1) phylogenetic >> guru >> distance

• . . . since distance-based methods (e.g. lexicostatistics) areunreliable.

• The single phylogenetic analysis in question, however, fails togenerate significant posterior probabilities at many of thecritical nodes (see next slide).

• This is probably due the fact that their comparative meaninglist was short (100 Swadesh), and possibly because neither ofthe authors were Arawakan specialists (although they reportrelying significantly on Payne’s (1991) cognacy judgements,who is a serious Arawakanist).

• We will therefore rely on ‘guru classifications’ for our overviewof the family.

• Aikhenvald and Campbell agree in the large-scale structure ofthe family (e.g. a basic Northern vs. Southern split) and mostof the lower-level subgroups.

• Campbell tends to posit more ‘mid-level’ structure thanAikhenvald does, making her more conservative thanCampbell, and we’ll follow her.

Figure: Walker and Ribeiro (2011) Arawakan classification

Figure: Arawakan

Figure: North Arawakan

Figure: South & Southwestern Arawakan

Figure: North Arawakan

Figure: Subgroup: Palikur

Figure: Subgroup: Rio Branco

Figure: Subgroup: Caribbean

Figure: Subgroup: North-Amazonian

Figure: South & Southwestern Arawakan

Figure: Subgroup: Pareci-Xingu

Figure: Subgroup: South Arawakan

Figure: Subgroup: Purus

Figure: Subgroup: Kampan

Figure: Subgroup: Yanesha’

Figure: Subgroup: Chamicuro-Morike

Typological profile

• Headmarking

• Agglutinative, overwhelmingly suffixing

• Noun-incorporation

• Noun Classifiers and Gender

Figure: Arawakan consonants

Figure: Arawakan vowels

Verbal person marking and alignment

• Arawakan languages tend to exhibit split-intransitivealignment systems

• Active-Stative (e.g. Apurina)• Constructionally conditioned (e.g. Matsigenka)

Apurina transitive verbs

• Apurina transitive verbs bear affixes that indicate the person,gender, and number of the subject and object, drawn from theset given in Table 1 (Facundes 2000).

subject object

sg pl sg pl

1 nu- a- -no -wa

2 pu- hi- -i -i3m o- u-. . . -na -ru -ru3f u- u-. . . -na -ro -ro

Table: Apurina verbal person affixes

Some examples

(2) a-etuka-ta-ru1plS-see-vblz-3fO

‘We saw it/her.’

(3) na-tama-ta-i1sgS-look-vblz-2O

‘I looked at you.’

• It is common in head-marking languages like Apurina forarguments to be expressed solely by person markers, as in (4),although they may occur with co-referential NPs, as in (5), oreven be supplanted by them, as in (6).

(4) o-atamata-ru3fsgS-look-3mO

‘She looked at him.’

(5) o-atamata-ru3fsgS-look-3mO

uwa3msg.pro

sutowoman

‘The woman looked at him.’

(6) makubrazil.nut

ata1pl.pro

apabring

‘We gather brazil nuts.’

Intransitive verbs

• The single argument of Apurina intransitive verbs is marked inone of two ways, depending on the lexical class of the verb.

• For non-stative verbs, the single argument is marked like theA argument of transitive verbs, as in (7).

• For stative verbs, the single argument is marked like the Pargument of transitive verbs, as in (8).

(7) nu-umaka-ko1SA-sleep-fut

‘I will sleep.’

(8) here-nobe.pretty-1SP

‘I am pretty.’

Nominal possesson

• Systems of nominal possession are quite uniform acrossArawakan languages.

• The basic components of Arawakan possession systems are:• Nominal possessive prefixes often identical to verbal ‘subject’

prefixes.• An alienable/inalienable distinction

• Based on two classes of nouns, with significant, but notentirely, semantic basis

• Inalienable nouns: ‘irrevocable’ possession, morphologicallyleast complex possession construction.

• Alienable nouns: potentially transitory possession,morphologically more complex possession construction

• Alienable possession suffixes• A derivational ‘alienator’ that derives alienable nouns from

inalienable ones

Inalienable Possession

• Inalienable possession is expressed by possessive prefixes that,in Arawak languages, are typically identical to the language’s‘subject’ prefixes.

• Consider the following Apurina (Facundes 2000) examples:

(9) nu-kuwu1sgP-head

‘my head’

(10) o-kano3fsgP-arm

‘her arm’

Alienable Possession

• Possession of alienable nouns typically differs from inalienablepossesion in that the former constructions involve a set ofadditional suffixes, the alienable possession suffixes.

• In most languages there are three of these suffixes, andtypically selected for by semantically-grounded lexical classes.

• Baniwa, for example exhibits the following suffixes (Ramirez2001: 124-125)

• -ni: used with most animals• -re: used mostly with manufactured objects• -te: residual category (humans, smaller animals, plants,

landform features, etc.)

(11) nu-tsiinuni-ni1P-dog-alien.poss

‘my dog.’

(12) nu-kenıke-re1P-garden-alien.poss

‘my garden.’

(13) nu-unai-te1P-port-alien.poss

‘my port.’

• Interestingly, in the Kampan languages, the distributionalproperties of the cognate morphemes have become quitedifferent (data from Matsigenka):

• -ne: disyllabic stems• -te: trisyllabic or larger stems• -re: irregular for a small subset of manufactured objects

(e.g. ‘arrow’, ‘paddle’).• -ma: ‘firewood’ only

Alienator

• Almost all Arawak language exhibit a reflex of Proto-Arawakalienator *-tsi, which derives alienable from inalienable nouns.

• In Apurina, its reflex is -tSi:

(14) kuwu-tSihead-alien

‘head’

• In some languages, such as Matsigenka, it is possible toalienably possess an inalienable root that has undergonealienation derivation, with interesting semantic consequences:

(15) no-ivatsa-tsi-tehead-alien

‘my flesh (i.e. to eat or cook, not of the possessor’sbody)’

Attributive and Privative

• Two morphemes found in the majority of Arawakan languagesand reconstructed to Proto-Arawakan are:

• Attributive: *ka-• Privative: *ma-

• These morphemes historically derived stative verbs frominalienable nouns in the following manner (Piapoco, Ramirez(2001:301)):

(16) ka-inuattr-wife

‘have a wife, be married’

(17) ma-inupriv-wife

‘have no wife, be single’

Diachrony of the privative

• Widespread agreement that the ‘privative’ *ma- reconstructsto Proto-Arawakan (Matteson 1972, Michael 2014a, Payne1991).

• Easily identifiable and productive reflexes of the PA privativeare found in most major branches of Arawakan.

• Even in languages (e.g., Anun), or branches (e.g., Kampan)which do not exhibit productive reflexes of the PA privative,roots exhibiting frozen forms of the privative can be found(Michael 2014b:212):

(18) magempi ‘deaf’, cf. gempita ‘ear’ (Nanti; Kampan)

(19) amatsogampi ‘be blunt’, cf. tsogampi ‘be sharp’(Nanti; Kampan)

• The morphosyntactic function of *ma- in PA is unclear,however:

• Reflexes of *ma- exhibit a range of functions, leading to thesuggestion that its modern reflexes serve as a ‘general negator’in Arawak languages (Aikhenvald 1999):

• Standard main clause negation (e.g., Garıfuna; adaptedfrom Munro and Gallagher 2014:20)

(20) M-afaruneg-hit

n-umu-ti1sg-tran-3m

‘I didn’t hit him.’

• Gnomic or habitual main clause negation (e.g., Baure;Danielsen 2007:187-188)

(21) Mo-yono-wo=ropriv-walk-cop=3sgm

‘He doesn’t walk.’

• Relative clause negation (e.g., Apurina; Facundes 2014:132)

(22) Kykyman

ma-kirata-rewa-ta-katypriv-snore-intr-vbz-rel.neg.m

mirekawake.up

‘The man who does not snore woke up.’

• Negation in Adverbial Clauses, e.g., Purposive,Conditional (e.g., Yine; Hanson 2013)

(23) wica1pl

w-hir1kota-pot1-ta-na-wa1pl-take.care.of-ints-vcl-refl-refl

w-kawa-ce-ta-ini1pl-bathe-freq-vcl-temp

hawaand

ma-cihloka-ya-n1-pa-w1priv-enter-appl-antic-all-1pl

waart

cwepicandiru

‘We take very good care of ourselves when we bathe,lest the candiru enter us.’

• Stative predicate negation (e.g., Lokono; Patte 2014:66)

(24) Ma-seme-thopriv-sweet-nl.f

todem.f

‘This is not sweet.’

• Denominal privative stative predicate derivation (e.g.Paresı; Brandao 2014:180)

(25) Ma-itsani-hapriv-son-pl

‘They will not have children.’

• The table presents the functions of reflexes of PA *ma- from28 of the approximately 45 living Arawakan languages,corresponding to those languages for which sufficientlydetailed grammatical descriptions of negation exist.

• The table is organized so that:• along the x-axis: morphosyntatic functions are arrayed

left-to-right from denominal privative to standard negation(SN).

• along the y-axis: languages are ordered top-to-bottom fromthose that display the least standard negation (SN)-likeproductive functions for reflexes of PA *ma- to the mostSN-like ones.

• The majority of languages in the sample either:

1. do not exhibit a productive reflex of *ma- (for some languages,examples frozen privatives have been located)

2. or exhibit the ‘classical’ denominal or destative derivationalfunctions.

• There is a tendency for languages that exhibit more SN-likefunctions to also exhibit less SN-like functions (a weakimplicational relation).

• Only two languages, Garıfuna and Tariana, employ a reflex ofthe privative as SN per se.

• The data in the Table can be construed as evidence for twoprincipal routes for privative extension:

• Broadening of the nominal target of privative derivation• Extension of privative as negation strategy derived statives to

underived statives

• Broadening of the nominal target of the privative: Thedata support the following implicational hierarchy, suggestinga diachronic process of broadening of the target of theprivative from inalienable nouns to nominalized verbs.

inalienable N<alienable N<nominalizedV(subordinate cl.)

• Most clearly attested in Apurina, Paresi, and Yine.

• Extending stative distribution: The data support thefollowing implicational hierarchy, suggesting a diachronicprocess of broadening from negation in derived statives tobasic statives, both as modifiers and main verbs, and tostative subordinate clauses.

derived stative<underived stativemodifier<subordinate non-stative (without V-ing),

main clause stative or habitual verb

• Extension of the privative as the negation strategy forunderived stative modifiers is amply attested, and alwaysentails the existence of a denominal stative derivation.

• The final step of extension to SN could have occurred in twoways:

• extension from stative to dynamic main verbs• insubordination of nominalized subordinate structures (likely

correct for Garıfuna)

• It is most parsimonious to reconstruct the denominal functionand infer that parallel developments in several branches of thefamily led to the privative extending its function frommaximally non-dynamic environments to fully dynamic mainclause ones.

Tuesday

• Grammatical Topics