b. Da-bode-da-bo. I-fishhook-NOUN.VERBALIZER-CONT
‘I am fishing with a line and hook.’ Arawak words may be divided into four classes based on the distribution of those words
in larger structures and based on internal inflectional differences. These classes are the fol- lowing: nominals, verbs, postpositions, and functors.
1. Nominals are those words which, without accompanying words other than articles, may serve as subject or object of a verb, or as object of a postposition. They may
be inflected for number but not for aspect or tense. For example: wadili and siba in Li wadili dykha siba-be
. the man see stone-PL ‘The man saw stones’. 2.Verbs are those words which, without accompanying words, may serve as predicate of a
clause.
8
They may be inflected for aspect and tense but not for number. For example: dalhida
in Li wadili dalhida-bo. the man run-PRES ‘The man is running’. Verbs in Ara- wak also include words expressing concepts which, in English, would be expressed by
adjectives. For example: firo in Firo-ka no. big-PERF it ‘It is big e.g. the house’. 3. Postpositions may not serve as the subject or object of a clause, and may not serve
as the predicate unless they are inflected with tenseaspect suffixes.
9
Some exam- ples of postpositions are the following: loko ‘inside of’, diako ‘on top of’, and oma
‘with accompaniment’. 4. Functors are those words which may not serve as predicate, subject, or object of a clause
and may not be inflected for number, tense, or aspect. This definition is a negative one and is set up primarily for descriptive convenience. They do, however, share one feature:
none of them can receive any of the pronoun prefixes or suffixes while nominals, verbs, and postpositions all can. Functors are all members of closed subclasses such as articles,
conjunctions, and adverbials. For example: to ‘the’, ken ‘and’, hibin ‘already’.
2.3 Nominals
The nominals of Arawak may be subdivided into nouns and pronouns. Nouns, except proper nouns, may receive a possessor prefix, while pronouns may not:
6 Common Noun
Proper Noun Pronoun
da-sikoa Adajali
de my-house
‘God’ ‘I’
‘my house’ The pronouns are discussed first since they exemplify in a clearer fashion some of the dis-
tinctions in number and gender that are also made among the nouns.
2.3.1 Personal Pronouns
Arawak pronouns are differentiated as to gender, person, humanness, and number. There are both personal and demonstrative pronominal forms. Grammatical case roles e.g.
2.3 Nominals 11
8
Nouns phrases may also be used predicatively, but only in attributive stative sentences. See Section 3.2.3.1.
9
See Section 2.5.1 for a discussion of the lexical status of postpositions and some reasons why they should be considered as distinct from both verbs and nominals.
genitive or possessive, objective are not distinguished morphologically. Thus, a pronoun occurring as a subject or an object of a clause has the same form as one occurring as the
object of a postposition or the possessor in a noun phrase.
2.3.1.1 Morphological Forms of Personal Pronouns
Personal pronouns Figure 4 have morphologically free and bound variants, each of which also has different forms depending on where it occurs in a clause or phrase.
10
Thus, personal pronouns potentially have four forms. shown in Figure 4:
11
1. a morphologically free form before a verb, a postposition, or a noun; 2. a morphologically bound form prefix before a verb, a postposition, or a noun;
3. a morphologically free form after a verb; 4. a morphologically bound form suffix after a verb.
The lexical meanings of corresponding variant forms of personal pronouns are all the same, whether the forms are bound, free, pre-head, or post-head. The use of the bound ver-
sus the free forms is dependent on discourse considerations; they are not freely inter- changeable. Informally stated, a bound pronoun tends to be used when its antecedent is
the last mentioned noun or pronoun having the same number and gender, whereas the equivalent morphologically free pronoun tends to be used when its antecedent is not the
last mentioned pronoun or noun but has, nevertheless, already been introduced into that section of the discourse. This tendency is even true within a single sentence. For example,
the possessive pronoun in 7a is understood as being coreferential with the subject. The possessive pronoun in 7b is usually understood as not being coreferential.
BEFORE HEAD AFTER HEAD
MEANING FREE
BOUND FREE
BOUND 1ST
SG. de
da- de
— 2ND
SG. bi
by- bo
— 3RD
SG. M.
H. li
ly- dei
-i 3RD
SG. NM.
H. tho
thy- no
-n SG.
NH. tho
thy- no
-n PL.
NH. tho
thy- —
— 1ST
PL. we
wa- we
-o 2ND
PL. hi
hy- hy
— 3RD
PL. H.
ne na-
je —
Notes: Where head stands for a verb, noun, or postposition.
Where head stands for a verb.
Figure 4. Arawak Personal Pronouns 12
Phonology and Morphology
10
De Goeje 1928, Hickerson 1953, and Taylor 1969 give slightly different spellings for several of the forms and include some additional ones. In the case of de Goeje’s data, this is understandable, given the date and
locations from which he obtained them see discussion in Chapter 1. In the cases of Hickerson and Taylor, it is unclear to me whether the differences are due to dialect differences or to the fact that both Hickerson and Taylor
depended partially on de Goeje’s data.
11
The shape of prefix pronouns is often obscured by vowel cluster reduction rules. See Section 2.1.2.
