Syntax of the Language of the Gavião Indians of Rondônia, Brazil

Abstract

This is the first major description of the language of the Gavião Indians of eastern Rondonia, Brazil. The Zoró, the Cinta Larga, and (probably) the Aruá Indians also speak dialects of this language, which belongs to the Monde family of the Tupi linguistic stock. This study is primarily a syntactic description. The analysis is generative in spirit; formal phrase structure rules and transformational rules are motivated and presented. Appendixes provide informal phonological and morphological sketches and an analyzed text. The noun phrase or person prefix subject of a Gavião clause immediately precedes an auxiliary stem, which indicates tense, aspect, mood, sentence structural type (copula/noncopula), and sentence functional type (e.g. imperative, nonassertative, postfactive, etc.). Any number of verb phrases and embedded clauses can occur in a clause. Their order can be scrambled with no change in meaning other than a loss or gain in prominence. Any predicate nominal, verb phrases, or embedded clauses occur after the auxiliary stem, but three preposing rules operate under certain conditions to front a predicate nominal (if any) and/or one verb phrase or embedded clause. These preposing operations front WH words and discourse pronouns. There are many particles which either occur at the beginning or at the end of a sentence. The occurrence possibilities of these particles are given, along with minor transformational rules involving them. The three minimal syntactic units are person prefixes, elementary words, and elementary word stems. Elementary words fall into five classes: nouns, verbs, pronouns, demonstratives, and particles. Elementary word stems fall into four classes: noun stems, verb stems (transitive or cross-referencing), adjective stems, and auxiliary stems. The Gavião system of complex words and complex word stems is highly developed. These complex units are constructed from the minimal syntactic units given above. Phrases are relatively simple in structure. The phonological sketch presents both surface and systematic phonemes. Major phonological rules are briefly stated. Downstep is a notable feature of the tone/length system. Gavião is a relatively isolating language. The morphological sketch describes affixation, compounding and the important stem formative processes.