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The Nheengatú Paradox. Dealing with loan-adjectives in a language with no adjectives| old_uid | 6985 |
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| title | The Nheengatú Paradox. Dealing with loan-adjectives in a language with no adjectives |
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| start_date | 2009/05/19 |
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| schedule | 10h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | The Nheengatú Paradox Dealing with loan-adjectives in a language with no adjectives Nheengatú is a Tupi-Guaranian language used as the ‘língua geral’ in the Upper Rio Negro (Amazônia, Brazil) by Baré (Negro), Baniwa (Içana) and Werekena (Xié) groups. These groups have switched from their traditional Arawakan languages to Nheengatú. Based on data of the three varieties gathered in 2007 and 2008, this analysis provides evidence that Nheengatú does not have a separate lexical class of adjectives. Instead, ‘physical properties’ and ‘human propensity’ are categorized in the language as ‘stative verbs’. In fact, even adjectives borrowed from Portuguese, such as largo, “wide” and limpo, “clean” are interpreted in Nheengatú as ‘stative verbs’. Like all verbs, the stative verbs (and, consequently, the loan-adjectives) function as predicate without any additional morphology, i. e., no copula is required to establish the predication. Moreover, they can receive a nominalizing suffix in order to behave as heads of noun phrases. |
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| responsibles | Kern |
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