(In)alienability in compound nouns in Apurinã (Arawak)

• Main Author: Freitas, Marília Fernanda Pereira de
• Publication Date: 2021
• Other Authors: Facundes, Sidney da Silva
• Format: Article
• Language: por
• Source: Cadernos de Estudos Linguísticos
• Download full: https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/cel/article/view/8661313
• topic: (In)alienability; Compound nouns; Apurinã; (In)alienabilidade; Nomes compostos; Apurinã

The status of compound nouns in Apurinã is discussed regarding the possibility of occurring in constructions of (in)alienable possession, based on data collected using contextual stimuli not previously used in Apurinã data collection. The use of contextual stimuli in data collection led to a revision and expansion of the analysis of the (in)alienability marking patterns in compound nouns in Apurinã. Facundes (2000) argued that the morphological marking patterns of (in)alienable nouns do not apply to compounds. Freitas (2017) starts from the definitions of Haspelmath (2008) and Stassen (2009) and analyzes (in)alienability in Apurinã based both on the morphological marking of nouns, and on their frequency of occurrence in texts; inalienable nouns have possession as part of their meanings, occur most often possessed in texts and are unmarked in possession constructions; among the inalienable nouns, there are i) inalienable nouns that can have their mandatory possession "suspended" by adding the suffix -txi, as in ny-tikaku (1SG-belly.of) 'my belly' / tikaku-txi (belly.of- N.POSSD) 'belly', and ii) inalienable nouns that do not occur with -txi, as they require a possessor, as in n-yry (1sg-pai.de) 'my father', instead of *yry-txi (someone’s father). Alienable nouns, on the other hand, occur most frequently not possessed in texts, being marked in possession constructions by the suffixes -te, -ne, -re1 and -re2, lexically conditioned, such as ny-xamynaky-te (1SG-shotgun-POSSD) / xamynaky 'shotgun'. The results of the analysis allowed us to conclude that, while the (in)alienability marking patterns also apply to productive compound nouns, they also indicate that the productive compound nouns marked as (in)alienable are used in more specific contexts, and less frequently in everyday life, or are neologisms, and that, therefore, they do not behave pragmatically like prototypical (in)alienable nouns in Apurinã.