Karitiâna language

Tupian language spoken in Brazil

Karitiana, otherwise known as Caritiana or Yjxa, is a Tupian language spoken in the State of Rondônia, Brazil, by 210 out of 320 Karitiana people, or 400 according to Cláudio Karitiana, in the Karitiana reserve 95 kilometres south of Porto Velho. The language belongs to the Arikém language family from the Tupi stock. It is the only surviving language in the family after the other two members, Kabixiâna and Arikém, became extinct.

Although the first Western contacts with the Karitiana people are believed to have begun in the 17th century, the first recorded contact dates to 1907 when a survey conducted by Cândido Rondon indicated that they were already working for Bolivian rubber tappers. Systematic contact between the Karitiana people and Caucasians, nevertheless began in the 1950s with the intervention of ISA and Roman Catholic Salesian missionaries. As a result of the missionaries' visit, a list of words and phrases were compiled, allowing Professor Aryon Rodrigues, who was working at the University of Campinas at the time, to classify the language as a member of the Arikém Family by comparing the language to existing materials on the Arikém language. Many of the Karitiana people are bilingual in Karitiana and Portuguese, and despite the population growth in recent years and the language's high level of transmission, the language is listed as vulnerable by UNESCO due to the low number of speakers and the proximity to the city of Porto Velho. A literacy project in the 1990s resulted in 24 students being made literate, and written documentation of the culture, as well as audio recordings were created. As of 2005, indigenous teachers have been holding lessons in the villages. However, the literacy project ended in 1997 due to a lack of permanent funding.

Some of the earliest works on the language date to the 1970s by missionary David Landin, who spent time in the Karitiana village between 1972 and 1977, through a partnership between FUNAI (Fundação Nacional do Índio) and SIL International (Summer Institute of Linguistics) (Landin, 2005). He has mainly studied syntax (1984), but has also compiled lexicon that has resulted in the creation of a Karitiana dictionary (2005). Another early researcher is Gloria Kindell, also from the SIL, who has analyzed phonological and syntactic aspects of Karitiana (1981). The first substantial grammar of Karitiana, however, was published by Luciana Storto (1999), describing topics on the phonology, morphology and syntax, and since then she has published a number of papers on Karitana syntax (2003, 2008, 2012, 2013, 2014). Subsequently, a number of studies on the language has continued to be published, covering a wide array of topics. Ana Müller, for example has published papers on Karitiana semantics (2006, 2009, 2010, 2012). Ivan Rocha da Silva has produced a variety of works on Karitiana syntax (Rocha 2014), including two extensive descriptions on syntactical topics (2011, 2016). Ethnographically, Felipe Ferreira Vander Velden has documented a number of social aspects of the Karitiana people, specifically researching about the relations between indigenous peoples and animals. He has published a book about domestic animals among the Kartitiana (2012).

Everett listed six word classes for Karitiana. In general, Karitiana follows the general trend in Tupi languages of presenting little dependent marking or nominal morphology, though it has a robust system of agglutinative verbal affixes. Valence related verbal prefixes occur closer to the verb root than other prefixes, and according to Everett, the most crucial valency distinction in Karitiana is the distinction between semantically monovalent and polyvalent verbs as this plays an important role in verbal inflections and clausal constructions, such as the formation of imperative, interrogative and negative clauses, as well as in the establishment of grammatical relations. Karitiana presents a binary future/non future tense suffix system and a number of aspect suffixes. It also presents desiderative inflection, an optional evidentiality suffix, a verb focus system among other constructions. Karitiana presents a nominalizer suffix that is attached to verbs in order to derive nouns. In general, nouns serving as core arguments for a verb are left unmarked for case, but non core arguments can receive allative and oblique case markers.

Karitiana expresses causation by the prefix m or the periphrastic tɨpõŋ, inferring that one participant is causing another to act in a certain manner. The prefix m is used to add an argument to intransitive verbs, and tɨpõŋ is used to add a third argument to a transitive verb, and the former agent receives the oblique suffix tɨ.

Karitiana displays an ergative pattern of agreement, where the subject agrees with the intransitive verb, and the object agrees with the transitive verb, as is shown in examples 1a to 1f. This pattern surfaces in all matrix clauses and is evident from person agreement morphology on verbs, and is true for both declarative and non declarative sentences. An exception is the object focus construction, where the transitive verb eccentrically agrees with the ergative argument as shown in examples 2a and 2b. This construction does not involve intransitivization, and the eccentric agreement is a product of object focus morphology. According to Everett many phenomena in Karitiana follow a nominative pattern generally due to the pragmatic status of arguments. The author argues that the grammatical relations of Karitiana suggest a system where syntactic phenomena often tend to display nominative accusative patterns, and morphological phenomena tend to display ergative absolutive patterns.

Noun phrases (NPs) in Karitiana surface as bare nouns, without any functional operator, such as inflection to mark number or definiteness. Bare nouns can refer to one or more entities, definite or indefinite, and these are determined by the context in which they occur. Karitiana does not require numeral classifiers, thus numerals receive the oblique suffix t and are directly linked to common nouns. The numeral system consists of units from 1 to 5, and larger numbers are expressed with a combination of these units. Karitiana makes a lexical distinction between mass and count nouns. Count nouns can be counted directly, while mass nouns require a system of measurement. Quantifying expressions can behave like adverbs or nouns. The word si'ĩrimat is used to mean nobody or never, and the word kandat is used to express quantification of nouns and verbs. Universal quantification is conveyed by the expression (ta)akatyym, where ta is a third person anaphora, aka is the verb to be, and tyym is the SUBordinate particle. This expression roughly means those who are. Anaphoric ta is used when the quantifying expression is not adjacent to the noun it modifies, and is not necessary when it is adjacent to the noun.