Ainore Boe egore: a descriptive study of Bororo and consequences to the theory of case and agreement

Author(s)

Rafael Bezerra Nonato

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
• Defense date: 2008-02-27

Examining board members

Maria Filomena Spatti Sândalo; Sonia Maria Lazzarini Cyrino; Luciana Raccanello Storto

• Advisor: Maria Filomena Spatti Sândalo

Abstract

Bororo has around 700 speakers, living in five villages in the region of Rondonópolis, MT. It is the last living language of the Bororoan family (the others, according to Kaufman (1994) were Umutina, whose last speaker died recently, Otuké, and a supposed dialect called West Bororo). This dissertation begins with a brief introduction (section 1) and a summary of the activities developed in the field (section 2). After that, it concentrates on its two main subjects: in the first part (section 3), it is a descriptive grammar of Bororo and, in the second (section 4), it proposes a theoretical model based on the data from this language. At last, it includes three appendixes: a Bororo-Portuguese lexicon (Appendix 1), the sentences elicited in the field (Appendix 2) and the stories collected and analyzed (Appendix 3). The grammar in section 3 employs mostly the terms from the grammar tradition that comes from the Greeks. Symbolism of the generative grammar is used only in some parts that it allowed to present in a more elegant a precise way. The model presented in the second part of this dissertation is based on the theory sketched in Chomsky (2000, 2001). Given the evidence that this theory doesn't account for the phenomena of case, agreement and movement of Bororo, some revisions are proposed in order to, essentially, rescue head movement to the syntax (head movement had been left to PF by Chomsky 2001), linking it explicatively to the phenomena of case and agreement and argument movement. Besides accounting for the data of an ergative active language as Bororo, this model is extended to other systems of case and agreement (ergative and accusative alike) and explains Holmberg Generalization (AU)