A Formal and Semantic Reconstruction of Cariban Postpositions
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Date
2019
Authors
Douglas, Jordan A. G.
Journal Title
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
With at least 25 attested languages in the family, the Cariban Language Family is found from Columbia to French Guiana to the Brazilian Amazon. Through a historical reconstruction that looks at 15 language in the family, this work examines the lexical class of POSTPOSITION—a word class that conveys spatiotemporal and grammatical information. Each language in the family has between 50-150 attested postpositions, many of which were relatively unexamined previously. While many have assumed that postpositions in the family were monomorphemic in nature, this work finds that the majority of the postpositions are in fact bipartite in nature— having either an opaque stem or a relational noun stem with a postpositionalizing suffix. While this bipartite nature of postpositions was observed for four opaque stems and 4 suffixes previously (Derbyshire 1999), this work finds that there are 13 reconstructable suffixes and 72 stems and monomorphemic postpositions—in addition there are multiple suffixes and stems that are limited to a single language. Through this work, the understanding of Cariban postpositions is now fundamentally changed. Monomorphemic postpositions tend to give information about grammatical relations (dative, ergative, addressee, etc.) as well as certain narrow locative meanings, such as the superessive. The stems give information about the ground by which an action occurs, such as a flat surface, a container, or liquid. Given that new postpositions are formed by putting suffixes on relational nouns (typically body parts), the opaque stems are likely to be old, semantically bleached relational nouns. However, in some languages, nominalized verbs are beginning to take postpositionalizing suffixes. (1) Tiriyó notonna 'behind (invisible)' from noto(mï) 'to block vision' (Meira 2006) notamï + -na > notamïna > notamna > notanna > notonna Suffixes combine with a stem to give the path relative to the ground, such as ablative and allative (i.e. English 'to', 'via', 'from', 'at', etc.). Of the reconstructed suffixes, there are a number of suppletive suffixes, with multiple allative, perlative, ablative, locative, and inessive suffixes. Each suffix lexicalized with different stems in different languages; in individual languages, no modern stem is attested as being able to occur with more than one suffix of each semantic category. (2) Ye'kwana kwa-ka Waimiri ka-ka Macushi ka-ta Wayana kwa-ta 'ALL liquid' 'ALL liquid' 'ALL liquid' 'in a port' (Cáceres forthcoming) (Bruno 2003) (Abbott 1991) (Tavares 2005) Further still, some of these suffixes, such as *po, are attested as monomorphemic and also as a stem. (3) Wayana po 'on (supported)' (Tavares 2005:171) po-lo 'along on' (Tavares 2005:315) uh-po 'on top of' from upu 'head' (Tavares 2005:171) uh-po-lo 'along on top of' from upu 'head' (Tavares 2005:318)
Description
235 pages
Keywords
Linguistics, Cariban, Historical Linguistics, Postpositions, Semantics, Spatiotemporal Positions