syllable. If a noun has the noun generalizer suffix, it is taken in a very abstract or general sense, not referring to any specific object or entity which exists or has existed or will exist.
11 Kakythinon kamyn-ka
khabo-ho. people
have-PERF hand-NGEN
‘People have hands.’ Kinship terms, other than special vocative forms, are never used without an expressed possessor.
16
Some additional examples of inalienable nouns are the following:
17
12 khabo-ho ‘hand’
da-khabo ‘my hand’
bana-ha ‘liver’
thy-bana ‘its liver’
aithi ‘son’
l-aithi ‘his son’
eretho ‘wife’
l-eretho ‘his wife’
yda-ha ‘skin’
ada yda ‘bark’ tree skin
bode-he ‘fishhook’
de bode ‘my fishhook’
Alienable nouns represent the majority of nouns. When they are possessed, in addition to be- ing preceded by a possessor pronoun either morphologically bound or free or a noun, they
receive one of the possession POSS suffixes, -n, -ja, or -ra.
18
When they are unpossessed, they may be used without any morphological modification. Although which suffix to use seems to
depend to some extent on the last syllable of the stem e.g. words ending in i tend to receive -ja
and to some extent on their origin e.g. many loan words receive -ja, there are many ex- ceptions, and thus it seems best to posit three arbitrary subclasses for them. In terms of fre-
quency, most nouns receive the -n suffix. Some examples of alienable nouns are as follows: 13 a. siba
ly-siba-n ‘stone’
‘his stone’ b. ada
d-ada-n ‘treewood’
‘my treewood’ c. karobo
wa-karobo-n ‘plate’
‘our plate’ d. arakabosa
de arakabosa-n ‘gun’
‘my gun’ e. kalhao
da-kalhao-ja ‘grass’
‘my grass’ f. boko
Adajali boko-ja ‘book’
‘God’s book i.e. Bible’ 2.3 Nominals
17
16
See Hickerson 1953, van Renselaar and Voorhoeve 1962, and de Goeje 1928 for descriptions of the Arawak kinship system.
17
An asterisk before an example or other cited form indicates that the form is ungrammatical or unacceptable Arawak. It should be understood that since I am not a native speaker of Arawak, some forms may be marked as
ungrammatical when they may not actually be so.
18
Note that -ja is written a when added to a word ending in i.
g. malhisi hi malhisi-a
‘corn’ ‘your pl. corn’
h. botoli Henk botoli-a
‘bottle’ ‘Henk’s bottle’
i. adisa d-adisa-ra
‘grating boat’ ‘my grating boat’
2.3.3.2 Gender in Nouns
In addition to being classified according to the categories of alienable and inalienable, Arawak nouns may also be loosely grouped according to the features of [+– human] and
[+– male]. This is reflected in the articles which occur with them. 14
li wadili ‘the man’
li adali ‘the sun’
to hiaro ‘the woman’
to oniabo ‘the water’
na kakythinon ‘the people’
As is the case with pronouns see Section 2.3.1.2 on pronoun gender, the features as- signed to the noun to some extent have to do with the speaker’s view of the referent of that
noun. For example, although wadili ‘male’ is usually used when referring to a man and therefore usually occurs with the masculine singular article li, it can also occur with the
non-masculine or non-human article to when referring to a non-Arawak.
2.3.3.3 Number in Nouns
As was indicated in the discussion of the third-person pronoun features Figure 5, the fea- ture [+– plural] is overtly indicated for pronouns only when the pronoun has the feature
[+human]. This is true also of the nouns.
19
Nouns referring to humans in the Arawak sense are intrinsically singular, and if they are used to refer to more than one person, they must be
pluralized with a pluralizing suffix. For example, if the following nouns refer to an Arawak therefore [+human] referent, the singular forms cannot refer to more than one person:
15 a. ibili small.one
‘child’ bian ibili
2 small.one ‘two children’
bian ibili-non 2 small.one-PL
‘two children’ 18
Phonology and Morphology
19
See also Taylor 1976. In addition to the two pluralizing suffixes I mention, he lists p. 373 an additional suffix -kho about which he says, “my examples of its use suffice only to suggest that it may refer to a ‘set’ or
collectivity rather than a plurality of persons or things: iborokho ‘little ones’...” This -kho morpheme also occurs a few times in my data; however, it sometimes occurs when neither ‘collectivity’ nor plurality seems to be involved.
For example, I have recorded several instances where -kho is added to the pronoun de ‘I’, and to the conjunction ken
‘and’. The only thing that all instances of -kho have in common is that they all seem to have to do with contrast or emphasis. Instances of dekho occurred in contrastive situations in which the author seemed to be saying: ‘I, not
someone else’. The only occurrences of kenkho I have recorded are at, or just before, the climax of a narrative e.g. in the Bomb Story in the appendix. It may be that this suffix is related to the homophonous, negative adverbial
particle kho ‘not’.
b. wadili male
‘man’ kabyn wadili
three male ‘three men’
kabyn wadili-non three male-PL
‘three men’ c. hiaro
female ‘woman’
bithi hiaro four female
‘four women’ bithi hiaro-non
four female-PL ‘four women’
In contrast to the above, and like the third-person pronoun tho, [–human] nouns may re- fer to either plural or singular referents. Their exact interpretation often depends on the
context in which they are found. For example, the following nouns refer to [–human] refer- ents, and they may be plural even without an overt pluralizing suffix:
16 a. sikoa house
‘househouses’ aba sikoa
one house ‘onea house’
bian sikoa two house
‘two houses’ b. ada dyna
tree arm ‘branchbranches’
aba ada dyna one tree arm
‘onea branch’ kabyn ada dyna
three tree arm ‘three branches’
c. siba stone
‘stonestones’ aba siba
one stone ‘onea stone’
bithi siba four stone
‘four stones’ Although it is not strictly necessary to do so, it is possible to add a pluralizing suffix
to a [–human] noun. In the case of a [–human] noun used in a context which does not force a plural interpretation, the use of the plural suffix apparently serves to disam-
biguate the speaker’s meaning. However, it is also sometimes used when the context is clear. In this case, it seems to emphasize that there is some sort of diversity among the
referents.
17 siba-be stone-PL
‘stones’ bian siba-be
two stone-PL ‘two different stones’
As can be gleaned from the human and non-human examples above, Arawak has two pluralizing suffixes: -non and -be. The suffix -non is only used with [+human] referents.
The suffix -be is used with both [+human] and [–human] referents. Thus it is also possible to say:
18 wadili-be ‘men’
hiaro-be ‘women’
As a matter of fact, both -non and -be can be used together on the same [+human] noun—and in either order.
17 hiaro-be-non ‘women’
hiaro-non-be ‘women’
2.3 Nominals 19
