A Grammar of Karo, Tupi (Brazil)

Abstract

The Karo language is spoken by approximately 150 Arara Indians in the state of Rondonia, in the southwest part of the Amazon region, in Brazil. It is genetically affiliated with the Ramarama branch of the Tupi family, one of the largest families of languages in South America. Karo is supposedly the sole language of its branch. The Arara Indians used to call themselves i ?/:;>rap (from i ?/:;> l ST PERSON INCLUSIVE pronoun, plus tap ASSOCIATIVE) 'ourselves, us', and are known to have Lived in their present location from time immemorial. They have been in contact with the surrounding white population since the l 940's, and although the majority of them are bilingual in Portuguese, they use the Karo language exclusively among themselves for communication. Prior to my work, nothing was known about the Karo language except for a few word.lists published by ethnologists (Horta Barbosa 1945; Levi-Strauss 1950; Nimuendaju 1925, 1955; Rondon 1948; Schultz 1955; Vitor Hugo 1959). Some of the main typological features of Karo include a) a complex interplay of segments and suprasegmentals at the phonetic and phonological levels; b) an extensive internal and external array of morphophonemic processes; c) a fairly simple morphology, with only a few derivational and inflectional processes, no case or gender marking on nouns; d) a relatively strict order of elements (determiners, adjectives, nouns, verbs, postpositions, etc.) within constituents (noun, verb, adverbial and postpositonal phrases); e) a relatively strict SOV word order; and f) a fairly rich inventory of particles with diferente grammatical functions such as noun classification and evidentiality. Thiu!issertation is arranged in a fairly intuitively progression of linguistic coffiplexity, moving from the smaller linguistic units, the sounds, to the larger units of morphology and syntax. In the last three chapters I deal with three grammatical systems found in Karo, the classifier system, the ideophone system, and the evidential system.