Contribuição aos estudos histórico-comparativos da família Tupari (Tupi): Aspectos fonológicos, morfológicos e morfossintáticos

Abstract

Comprising the Akunsu, Ayuru, Makurap, Mekens (or Sakurabiat) and Tupari languages, all located in the State of Rondônia (Brazil), the Tupari family is one of the most important language families for the reconstruction of the Tupi language trunk, mainly due to its great temporal depth. The proposal of the present project is to submit morphological and morphosyntactic aspects of three Tupari languages (Makurap, Mekens and Tupari) to a historical-comparative investigation in order to identify system properties of the morphology and morphosyntax of Proto-Tupari, the ancestral language of this language family. To this end, we investigated flexional and derivational morphemes of the Makurap, Mekens and Tupari languages, comparatively evaluating the phonological, morphological and morphosyntactic properties of these morphemes. The research procedure adopted was the Comparative Method (Fox, 1995; Jeffers; Lehist, 1986), initially establishing correspondences at the phonological level, and then moving on to consider the functions of the morphemes analyzed. The main results are the proposed reconstruction of the pronominal system (free and bound forms) of Proto-Tupari, as well as the reconstitution of derivational morphemes. It was observed that in the three languages the pronominal forms are distributed in an Ergative system (independent pronouns = argument A; dependent pronouns = arguments 5 and O), pointing to this morphosyntactic distribution already in Proto-Tupari. These data can be interpreted as additional evidence that corroborates the genetic proximity between the Makurap, Mekens and Tupari languages, as well as allowing a broader understanding of the Proto-Tupari language system.