Relações nominais em mundurukú: posse vs. modificação

Abstract

The Mundurukú language (Tupí trunk) is spoken in the Upper Tapajós region by a population exceeding four thousand speakers distributed in approximately eighty-seven villages. In several Tupí languages there is a variety of types of nominal constructions, often without explicit marking. As a contribution to the typology of Tupí Syntax, we investigate these nominal constructions in Mundurukú. In this language, nouns have intrinsic subcategorization for the type of construction they form, and also derivation processes to change the subcategorization. In the analysis, using original data collected from native speakers of the language, it was observed that possessive constructions in Mundurukú divide names into "alienable" and "inalienable", The general pattern of a genitive construction consists of a pronoun or a noun, the possessor, followed by the possessed name. The point is that the [N1N2] pattern can either represent a possessor-possessed relationship or indicate a modifier-noun relationship, depending on which nominal sub-categories are involved. There are some criteria for distinguishing possessor from modifier, such as: (i) N 1, being the possessor, needs to be [+ANIMATED]; (ii) N 1 being [-ANIMATED] indicates that this is necessarily a modifier; and (iii) only possessor can be directly replaced by personal prefixes. The results indicate that nominal constructions in Mundurukú have features in common with corresponding constructions in the Mondé and Ramarama families.