Leiden University Student Repository

Michels, Marc (2014)

Verbal Morphology in Mawayana

Bachelor thesis | Taalwetenschap (BA)

This research attempts to give a description of the verbal morphology of the moribund Mawayana language from the Arawakan language family. Little has been written about Mawayana, but there is a corpus of stories and elicited texts. That corpus has been used for this research. Several suffixes have been found, including valency marking suffixes and TAME-markers. Also quite a few clitics may occur on verbs, including the typical Arawakan pronominal elements. Other clitics do not have clear cognates in related languages and may or may not be innovations of Mawayana. In general, quite some restructuring of the verbal morphology has taken place in Mawayana and/or the closest related language Wapishana since the two split apart. The result in Mawayana seems quite chaotic, but this may be due to the limited size of the corpus. Still, there is some clear structure that becomes more clear once the many clitics have been divided on morphosyntactic or semantic grounds.

Mawayana

Arawakan languages

morphology

verbs

Author

Michels, Marc

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Taalbeschrijving

Supervisors

Carlin, E.B.

ECTS Credits

10

Language

en