A grammar of Movima

620 Pages·2006·3.214 MB·English

by  Katharina Haude

A Grammar of Movima
The research presented in this book was carried out with the financial support of the Spinoza
Project “Lexicon and Syntax”.

Printed and bound by Drukkerij Manta, Zetten (NL)
Cover photographs: Speakers of Movima, by Katharina Haude

ISBN 90-90203-16-8
© Katharina Haude, 2006
A Grammar of Movima

een wetenschappelijke proeve
op het gebied van Letteren

Proefschrift

ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor
aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. dr. C.W.P.M. Blom,
volgens besluit van het College van Decanen
in het openbaar te verdedigen op maandag 6 februari 2006
des namiddags om 1.30 uur precies

door
Katharina Haude
geboren op 9 januari 1973 te Göttingen
Promotor: Prof. dr. P.C. Muysken

Manuscriptcommissie: Prof. dr. C. Versteegh (voorzitter)
Dr. H.G.A. van der Voort
Prof. dr. W.F.H. Adelaar (Universiteit Leiden)
Acknowledgements

Many people have helped me get this work done. First and foremost, my gratitude goes to
Pieter Muysken, who has made this project possible by hosting it within his Spinoza
programme “Lexicon and Syntax” at the Radboud University Nijmegen. Not only did I
benefit from his insightful comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript, which were always
to the point and opened new lines of thought for me. He also gave me the feeling that
whatever problem there would be on the way, he would try to help out. Whenever I
approached him for linguistic or non-linguistic advice, I got an open ear, no matter whether it
was the right moment or not. His confidence in this project and his constant encouragement
were an enormous support.
I was also very lucky in that during the entire project, I had Rik van Gijn as my office mate.
This meant lots of fun, discussions, and the possibility to exchange experiences on life in the
linguistic world. My work has benefited greatly from Rik’s insights and from his talent to
present things systematically.
Hein van der Voort, occasional office mate, advised me in many ways. In particular, I am
very grateful for his extremely detailed, critical and helpful comments on the entire
manuscript.
I owe many thanks to Mily Crevels, who has helped me a lot especially at the beginning of
this project. In particular, Mily accompanied me to Santa Ana in 2001, and through her I got
acquainted with the people who became my closest friends there. With respect to field work
and dealing with practical matters in the Beni, Mily gave me the most valuable advice.
Outside the Spinoza group, I want to thank the following linguists for commenting on
earlier drafts of specific chapters of this book, for discussing the data with me, and/or for
advising me on particular topics: Willem Adelaar, Martin Böhler, Werner Drossard, Dan
Everett, Mats Exter, Ad Foolen, Colette Grinevald, Carlos Gussenhoven, Birgit Hellwig,
Nikolaus Himmelmann, Helen de Hoop, Haike Jacobs, Leonid Kulikov, Geraldine Legendre,
Andrej Malchukov, Maarten Mous, Doris Payne, Hans-Jürgen Sasse, René Schiering, Anna
Siewierska, Leon Stassen, and Fernando Zúñiga. I am especially grateful to Werner Drossard,
Nikolaus Himmelmann, and Hans-Jürgen Sasse for the long and inspiring discussions on the
Movima voice and valency system, whose essence I would probably never have understood
otherwise. My particular gratitude also goes to Willem Adelaar and Carlos Gussenhoven for
discussing earlier versions of the phonology chapter with me, and for their patience in
answering my numerous questions on the topic. In addition, I am deeply indebted to Willem
Adelaar for his valuable comments on the entire manuscript. And Maarten Mous is especially
thanked for sitting with me for hours when I was desperate and did not know how this work
could ever come to an end.
Pilar Valenzuela is acknowledged for pointing out Movima to me as a possible language of
research.
I furthermore want to thank the participants of the Americanist Colloquium in Nijmegen for
their comments on my talks, in particular Jürgen Bohnemeyer, Swintha Danielsen, Martina
Faller, Rafael Fischer, Jesus Mario Girón, Katja Hanss, Roland Hemmauer, Sergio Meira,
Loretta O’Connor, and Frank Seifart. And without the critical questions from the participants
of my “Strukturkurs Movima” at the Linguistics Department in Cologne, some problems and
contradictions in my analyses would hardly ever have become apparent to me.
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While it was not possible to integrate into the present work all the comments I got, they
highly increased my insight into the Movima grammar.
My research has also benefited greatly from the open and friendly atmosphere at the
Linguistics Department of the Radboud University in Nijmegen. My thanks go particularly to
Helen de Hoop, Monique Lamers, Peter de Swart, Andrej Malchukov, Joost Zwarts, Wilske
Driessen, Janine van der Zijl, Else Havik, Margot van den Berg, and Marleen van de Vate.
It is hard to express my gratitude adequately to the Movima speakers who contributed the
data on which this grammar is based. Their hospitality and their willingness to teach me their
language were overwhelming.
First of all, I want to thank Esaltación Amblo Ovales, who took upon herself the task of
teaching me Movima. She is the best teacher I could have imagined, with her clarity of
pronunciation, her great memory, and her readiness to talk to me in Movima about all kinds of
topics. I am also grateful to her sister Etelvina and her cousin Modesta for receiving me in
their house with so much friendliness.
My thanks go furthermore to Julia Malale Humasa, my principal teacher during my first and
my last stay. Good-humoured and funny, yet serious when it came to analysing her language,
she is a delightful instructor.
I owe many thanks to Eligardo Chirimani Malue for working with me every day right from
the beginning. Without his linguistic insight and his careful judgment, it would never have
been possible to create such a large and useful text database. Apart from that, it is mainly due
to the fact that he and Melvin Rossel Yoqui took so much interest in maintaining their native
language that this research was carried out at all. The other members of the Subcentral
Indígena Movima are also acknowledged for supporting this project throughout.
I am furthermore grateful to Griselda Cáumol, Balvina Almaquio, Herlan Rojas, Ela Rossel,
Nelly Gualusna, Peregrina Cayú, Dora Vargas, Delmira Masaro, Nataniel Cáumol, Eleuterio
Mole, Alejandro Yónima, Juan Hualima, Bernarda Gualusna, María Esaltación Sepi, and Luis
Yalauma for teaching me their language.
Most of my teachers I would never have met without the help of Janeth Cayalo. She took
me with her on her motorbike every day during the beginning of my field work to find
consultants. I am deeply grateful to her.
This leads me to other friends in Santa Ana without whom my stays there would have been
much less effective and pleasant. Elsita Asbún, Esperanza Cayalo, Sonia Rivero, and Graciela
Rodríguez helped me in all aspects of daily life and became dear friends. Olga Arteaga and
her family provided a home for me for most the time, and their parrot was my most faithful
companion and probably the only one who learned words from me. I am also indebted to
Milton Villavicencio and his wife Loida for their great hospitality.
Outside Santa Ana, I especially want to thank Dr. Carlos Patiño Kühn in Santa Cruz for
taking my health worries off my back. Gudrun Birk is thanked for digging with me in the
APCOB library.
Last but not least, I want to thank my parents for their strong support at all times. My
friends in Cologne took up with my unusual lifestyle with much understanding. And my
deepest gratitude is with Harald Stoffels, who accompanied me towards and throughout this
entire project, and who is the main responsible for the fact that the years of thesis writing
were very happy years.
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Contents

List of Maps…………………………………………………………………………………...xi
List of Figures………………………………………………………………………………....xi
List of Tables……………………………………………………………………………….…xi
Symbols and abbreviations.......................................................................................................xii
Regional terms..........................................................................................................................xv

1 Introduction......................................................................................................................1
1.1. The name of the language..........................................................................................1
1.2. Geographic location...................................................................................................1
1.3. History and ethnographic data....................................................................................2
1.4. The situation of the language.....................................................................................4
1.5. Number of speakers....................................................................................................5
1.6. Genetic affiliation.......................................................................................................6
1.7. History of linguistic description.................................................................................6
1.8. Field work, consultants, and data...............................................................................7
1.9. Structural characteristics of Movima.........................................................................8
1.10. The organization of this book...............................................................................12
1.11. Presentation of the data........................................................................................13

2 Phonology........................................................................................................................17
2.1. The vowel inventory.................................................................................................18
2.1.1. Phonemic vowel length....................................................................................19
2.2. The consonant inventory..........................................................................................20
2.3. The glottal stop and the nasally released glottalized voiceless plosives..................28
2.3.1. The glottal allophones of /p/, /t/, and /k/..........................................................28
2.3.2. The realization of the glottal stop and the nasalized plosives..........................29
2.3.3. The status of the glottal stop............................................................................31
2.4. Assimilation of nasals..............................................................................................34
2.5. Nasalization of vowels.............................................................................................35
2.6. Aspiration of /s/ and /(cid:1)/............................................................................................36
2.7. Syllable structure......................................................................................................37
2.7.1. Vowel-initial elements.....................................................................................38
2.7.2. Hiatus resolution..............................................................................................43
2.7.3. The distribution of the consonants...................................................................44
2.7.4. The structure of independent words.................................................................45
2.8. Suprasegmental features...........................................................................................46
2.8.1. Stress................................................................................................................46
2.8.2. Length...............................................................................................................47
2.8.3. Stress and length in loans.................................................................................50
2.8.4. Tone..................................................................................................................51
2.8.5. Intonation.........................................................................................................51
2.9. Morphophonemics....................................................................................................55
2.9.1. Phonological effects of morphological processes............................................55
2.9.2. Morphologically conditioned long vowels.......................................................56
2.9.3. The linking nasal..............................................................................................58
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2.9.4. The linking vowel /a/........................................................................................61
2.9.5. The dummy element /.i/...................................................................................61
2.9.6. Epenthetic vowels and vowel identity..............................................................63
2.9.7. Allophony in reduplication...............................................................................63
2.9.8. Vowel dissimilation: the distribution of the allomorphs /uk/ and /aj(cid:2)/.............64
2.10. The spelling used in this book..............................................................................65
2.10.1. The spelling of /p/, /t/, and /k/..........................................................................66
2.10.2. The spelling of /t(cid:3)/, /(cid:4)/, /h/, and /j/..................................................................66
2.10.3. Representation of the glottal stop.....................................................................67
2.10.4. Orthographic representation of the release vowel............................................67
2.10.5. Representation of vowel length........................................................................68
2.10.6. Representation of stress....................................................................................68

3 Morphological Units and Processes..............................................................................69
3.1. Roots and bases........................................................................................................69
3.2. Bound lexical elements............................................................................................72
3.3. Affixes......................................................................................................................73
3.4. Compounding...........................................................................................................74
3.5. Incorporation............................................................................................................75
3.6. Infixation and pseudo-infixation..............................................................................77
3.6.1. Pseudo-infixes: -a ‘bivalent direct’ and -ka ‘multiple event’..........................77
3.6.2. The infix <a’> ‘irrealis’...................................................................................78
3.6.3. Summary: (pseudo-)infixation.........................................................................83
3.7. Reduplication...........................................................................................................84
3.7.1. General characteristics.....................................................................................84
3.7.2. What is reduplicated?.......................................................................................85
3.7.3. Bivalent voice marking....................................................................................87
3.7.4. Nominalization of predicate nominals.............................................................89
3.7.5. Marking of inalienable adnominal possession.................................................89
3.7.6. Marking a possessive predicate........................................................................90
3.7.7. Middle voice marking......................................................................................92
3.7.8. Reduplication of bivalent verb roots................................................................93
3.7.9. Reduplication for prosodic well-formedness...................................................93
3.7.10. Impersonal verbs..............................................................................................94
3.7.11. Emphasis..........................................................................................................94
3.7.12. Summary: the functions of reduplication.........................................................95
3.8. Recursive Derivation................................................................................................96
3.9. Cliticization..............................................................................................................97
3.9.1. Internal cliticization..........................................................................................97
3.9.2. External cliticization......................................................................................101
3.9.3. Neutral cliticization........................................................................................103
3.10. Parts of Speech...................................................................................................106
3.10.1. Verbs..............................................................................................................107
3.10.2. Nouns.............................................................................................................108
3.10.3. Morphemes shared by nouns and verbs.........................................................111
3.10.4. Adjectives.......................................................................................................112
3.10.4.1. Semantic characteristics of adjectives....................................................113
3.10.4.2. Syntactic characteristics of adjectives....................................................114
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3.10.4.3. Morphological characteristics of adjectives...........................................117
3.10.5. Some borderline cases between verbs, adjectives, and nouns........................120
3.10.6. Question words...............................................................................................122
3.10.7. Particles..........................................................................................................127
3.10.8. Referential elements.......................................................................................128

4 Referential elements and deixis...................................................................................131
4.1. Referential elements encoding first and second person.........................................131
4.1.1. General properties..........................................................................................131
4.1.2. Morphological and semantic properties of SAP referential elements............133
4.2. Free and bound personal pronouns of third person................................................136
4.3. The demonstratives................................................................................................138
4.4. The article and the noun phrase..............................................................................139
4.5. Towards a morphological analysis of the third-person referential elements .........143
4.6. Oblique marking and demonstrative adverbs.........................................................145
4.7. Semantic categories encoded by the third-person referential elements.................147
4.7.1. Gender............................................................................................................148
4.7.2. Number...........................................................................................................150
4.8. Pragmatic categories encoded by the third-person referential elements................155
4.8.1. Presence and absence.....................................................................................155
4.8.2. Existence and ceased existence......................................................................158
4.8.2.1. The marking of ceased vs. ongoing existence with concrete referents..161
4.8.2.2. Past vs. non-past marking of temporal and action nominals..................166
4.8.2.3. Summary: the applicability of the past article........................................167
4.8.2.4. Immediate past.......................................................................................168
4.8.3. The absential referential elements as markers of evidentiality......................171
4.8.4. Summary: accessibility marking by the article..............................................173
4.9. Pragmatic properties of the demonstratives...........................................................174
4.9.1. The proximate demonstratives.......................................................................174
4.9.2. The positional demonstratives........................................................................177
4.9.2.1. On ground: standing vs. non-standing (Set 1 and 2)..............................178
4.9.2.2. On ground vs. elevated (Sets 1, 2 vs. Set 3)...........................................181
4.9.2.3. Set 4: temporary possession...................................................................186
4.9.2.4. The distal forms......................................................................................187
4.9.2.5. Set 5 and 6: moving referents.................................................................188
4.9.3. The absential and the past demonstratives.....................................................189
4.10. Congruence in semantic and pragmatic categories............................................192

5 Nouns and bound nominal elements...........................................................................194
5.1. Simple nouns..........................................................................................................194
5.1.1. Independent di- and polysyllabic roots..........................................................194
5.1.2. Phonologically defective nouns.....................................................................196
5.2. Compounding.........................................................................................................197
5.2.1. General characteristics...................................................................................198
5.2.2. Compounds based on verb roots....................................................................200
5.2.3. Compounds with adjectival roots...................................................................202
5.3. Bound nominal elements........................................................................................203
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5.3.1. Introduction....................................................................................................203
5.3.2. Bound roots....................................................................................................205
5.3.2.1. Reduplication of relational noun roots...................................................205
5.3.2.2. Bound roots with -‘i...............................................................................207
5.3.2.3. Bound roots with -kwa...........................................................................208
5.3.3. Truncation......................................................................................................212
5.3.4. Other bound nominal elements......................................................................220
5.3.5. Homophony....................................................................................................223

6 Possession......................................................................................................................227
6.1. The encoding of possession....................................................................................227
6.2. Types of nouns.......................................................................................................230
6.3. Possessive marking on relational and non-relational nouns...................................232
6.3.1. Bases which remain unmodified when marked as possessed........................232
6.3.2. Possessive marking on phonologically defective nouns................................235
6.3.3. The overt marking of non-relational nouns....................................................236
6.4. The marking of inalienable possession..................................................................237
6.4.1. Infixing reduplication.....................................................................................238
6.4.2. The applicative suffixes -e(cid:1) and -(cid:1)e as markers of possessive bases..............239
6.5. Nouns with -kwa denoting parts of wholes............................................................243
6.5.1. No base modification: alienable possession...................................................245
6.5.2. Omission of -kwa...........................................................................................245
6.5.3. Retention and reduplication of -kwa..............................................................248
6.6. Body-part terms......................................................................................................249
6.6.1. Type 1: Simple body-part terms.....................................................................251
6.6.2. Type 2. Reduplicated bases............................................................................252
6.6.3. Type 3. Body-part terms with -kwa................................................................252
6.6.4. Type 4: body-part terms with -‘i....................................................................254
6.7. Summary................................................................................................................256

7 Clause and sentence structure.....................................................................................257
7.1. Basic clause structure.............................................................................................258
7.2. The formal distinction of third-person core arguments..........................................259
7.3. The representation of arguments outside the canonical position...........................262
7.3.1. Argument representation by a free form in post-predicate position...............263
7.3.2. Argument representation by a free form in clause-initial position.................264
7.3.3. Argument representation by a demonstrative.................................................266
7.4. Speech act participants (SAPs) as arguments........................................................268
7.5. The hierarchical alignment system.........................................................................275
7.5.1. Direct and inverse...........................................................................................276
7.5.2. Obviative marking..........................................................................................279
7.5.3. The ergativity split in affirmative main clauses.............................................280
7.6. Oblique arguments.................................................................................................281
7.7. Morphosyntactic effects of argument incorporation..............................................283
7.8. The kaw-construction.............................................................................................287
7.9. Nonverbal predicates and predicateless clauses.....................................................289
7.9.1. Predicate nominals.........................................................................................289
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