Subordinate clauses versus clause nominalization in Karitiana: a comparative study

• Grant number: 14/14044-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: October 13, 2014
• End date: October 12, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Luciana Raccanello Storto
• Grantee: Ivan Rocha da Silva
• Supervisor: Patience L. Epps
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Texas at Austin (UT), United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 12/02769-7 - Argument structure of verbs in subordinate clauses in Karitiana: verbal valence and their interaction with aspect functional nuclei, BP.DR

Abstract

The current project investigates differences among subordinate clauses (adverbial, relative, and complement). In the first section, the emphasis will be on demonstrating the differences between complement and relative clauses, since we have already discovered the structural properties of adverbial clauses which permit us to distinguish adverbials from complements and relatives. In the second section, we will investigate nominalization and infinitival embedded clauses marked respectively by the suffixes {-pa} and {-p} in Karitiana. Our aim is to show that the language exhibits subordination rather than nominalization in adverbial, relative and argument clauses, contrary to what several linguists who work on Amazonia have claimed for their languages. Even though subordination in Karitiana does not display any morphology of agreement, tense, or mood, it is true that the language shows many other functional heads such as morphemes of causativization, passivization, and object focus construction (OFC), as well as aspectual nuclei, and word order variation (SOV, SOtiV, OSV and OStiV) in relatives clauses, suggesting that they are clauses rather than nominals. In addition, the language displays a nominalizer morpheme when non-finite clauses occur as complements of copular verbs as well as in other environments what suggests that embedded clauses that are nominalized must have a specific morpheme whereas others do not. In order to investigate these issues, we will adopt as our methodology data elicitation, including (un)grammatical judgments, as well as the analysis of natural data from mythic narratives. (AU)

Scientific publications

(References retrieved automatically from Web of Science and SciELO through information on FAPESP grants and their corresponding numbers as mentioned in the publications by the authors)

IVAN ROCHA. INTRODUZINDO ARGUMENTOS À ESTRUTURA VERBAL KARITIANA. Alfa, rev. linguíst. (São José Rio Preto), v. 64, 2020-10-28. (14/14044-2)