O Marcador de Posse Alienável em Karirí: Um Morfema Macro-Jê Revisitado

Abstract

This paper is a result of an ongoing project of lexical compilation and grammatical analysis of Karirí (also known as Kirirí), an extinct indigenous language from Northeast Brazil. Although two of its dialects are known only through short wordlists (Martius 1867), two of them were fairly welldocumented—Kipeá (Mamiani 1877, 1942), on which this paper is based, and Dzubukuá (Nantes 1896). Karirí has been included in the Macro-Jê stock (Rodrigues 1986, 1999), although in rather hypothetical terms. However, in spite of the lack of comprehensive lexical comparison to date, recent studies have shown very suggestive cases of grammatical affinities between Karirí and other Macro-Jê languages. One of them, first mentioned by Rodrigues (1992a: 386), is the existence, in Jê, Maxakalí, Boróro, and Karirí, of an apparently cognate morpheme marking alienable possession, although the evidence for the existence of this morpheme in Karirí provided then was quite cursory. The main purpose of the present work is to provide further support for the existence of the marker of alienable possession in Karirí. In addition, this paper briefly discusses the syntactic nature of genitive constructions containing such a morpheme and the existence, in the Jê family, of another morpheme of similar functions, probably reconstructible for Proto-Jê and cognate with a Tupí-Guaraní prefix.

Keywords

• Línguas da América do Sul. Línguas amazônicas. Documentação linguística. Linguística antropológica. Línguas amazônicas. Índios da América do Sul.