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A Formal and Semantic Reconstruction of Cariban

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A Formal and Semantic Reconstruction of Cariban A FORMAL AND SEMANTIC RECONSTRUCTION OF CARIBAN POSTPOSITIONS By JORDAN A.G. DOUGLAS A THESIS Presented to the Department of Linguistics and the Robert D. Clark Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts June 2019 An Abstract of the Thesis of Jordan A.G. Douglas for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in the Department of Linguistics to be taken June 2019. Title: A Formal and Semantic Reconstruction of Cariban Postpositions Approved: ____________________________________ Spike Gildea 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 ii 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) iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank Professor Spike Gildea for his guidance, his patience, and his introduction of the Cariban language family to me. I would like to thank Professor Don Daniels and Professor Emerita Louise Bishop for serving on my thesis committee. I would like to thank Professors Eric Pederson and Scott DeLancey for our riveting discussions of semantic change. I would like to thank Sérgio Meira for his excellent work that spurred my thoughts and analysis. I would like to thank my family, Ruby, Parker, and Juliet, for supporting me through it all. I would like to thank all of the friends and coworkers and strangers who have offered their support and their ears in my excited attempts to explain my work and research. Lastly, I would like to thank you for taking the time to read this thesis, the culmination of hundreds of hours of my life. It truly means a lot to me. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments ....................................................................................................................... iv List of Accompanying Materials ................................................................................................. vii List of Tables .............................................................................................................................. viii List of Figures ............................................................................................................................ viii 1 Introduction, Existing Literature, and Methodology .................................................................. 1 1.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Literature Review (Formal and Comparative Literature) .................................................... 2 1.3 Literature Review (Semantic) ............................................................................................. 7 1.4 Source Base ....................................................................................................................... 15 1.5 Methodology and Data Collection .................................................................................... 18 Morphological Analysis ...................................................................................................... 19 Comparison of Phonological Forms .................................................................................... 20 Phonological Reconstruction ............................................................................................... 21 Comparison of Semantic Forms and Semantic Reconstruction .......................................... 23 1.6 Subgroupings ..................................................................................................................... 25 1.7 The Appendices ................................................................................................................. 26 2 Postpositionalizing Suffixes ..................................................................................................... 29 2.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 29 2.2 Suffixes vs. Monomorphemic Postpositions ..................................................................... 29 2.3 Postpositionalizing Suffixes Cognate Sets ........................................................................ 33 *ka ‘allative’ ........................................................................................................................ 34 *na ‘allative’ ........................................................................................................................ 36 *këi ‘allative’ ....................................................................................................................... 38 *këtyë ‘allative’ ................................................................................................................... 40 *irë ‘perlative’ ..................................................................................................................... 41 *ro ‘perlative’ ...................................................................................................................... 43 *këkë ‘perlative’ .................................................................................................................. 44 *ye ‘ablative’ ....................................................................................................................... 44 *wë ‘locative’ ...................................................................................................................... 47 *po ‘locative (vertical support and contact)’ ....................................................................... 49 *të and *ta ‘inessive’ ........................................................................................................... 51 *ke ‘instrumental’ ............................................................................................................... 54 3 Monomorphemic Postpositions ................................................................................................ 56 3.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 56 3.2 Reconstructable Monomorphemic Postpositions .............................................................. 56 v *pëkë ‘adhesion-attachment’ ............................................................................................... 56 *pëkërë ‘behind (antessive)’ ............................................................................................... 60 *marë ‘comitative (inclusive)’ ............................................................................................ 62 *akërë ‘commitative (exclusive)’ ........................................................................................ 63 *te ‘desiderative’ ................................................................................................................. 64 *wara ‘similarative’ ............................................................................................................
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