Os sistemas de marcação de pessoa no verbo em Tiriyo.

Abstract

Thanks to the material available at the Goeldi Museum and the help of an informant who is currently in Belém, it was possible to study the Tiriyó language, a little known Karib language with about nine hundred speakers, half of them in Brazil, in the Tumucumaque Indigenous Park. After obtaining a preliminary phonological picture of the language, aspects of its syntax and morphology were analyzed. Of particular interest was the discovery of four different groups of verbal prefixes for person marking in intransitive verbs. The similarity of some of these prefixes to those used to identify either the subject or the object in transitive verbs suggested analysis in terms of an active/stative system. Morphologically, the Tiriyó person-marking system comes quite close to an active/stative system, but the semantic correlation is less coherent than one might expect. Three of the four prefix systems are quite similar, and may be indiosyncratic. With further research, it is hoped to be able to definitively resolve this question.