A forma verbal TXA da língua Apurinã: um fenômeno de gramaticalização

Abstract

Semantic domains as polysemy and homonymy do not explain satisfactorily some behaviors related to the verb txa of the Apurinã (Arawak) language, spoken by indigenous communities that live along tributaries of the Rio Purus, southwest of the Amazonas state. Hence, the grammaticalization process is the option which better offers the possibility to analyze and describe the form of this verb manifestation in the language, which ccurs in different contexts, with distinct meanings and syntactic behavior, but the same verb form. Facundes (2000) describes the txa verb as behaving as a full verb, pro-verb, copula verb, and auxiliary verb. The hypothesis is that there is some semantic relation between the different occurrences of the verb, but with morphosyntactic behavior that differ according to the verb meaning/function. Therefore, it is possible to consider that there is a grammaticalization process in progress in the language, wherein some “source” verbal meaning gives origin to a “target” meaning, this last one being more abstract, as a result of a semantic bleaching process. This research consisted of a selected a corpus composed of 32 texts, part of the Apurinã language database, plus some other texts collected with native speakers through field trip, a systematic survey of the different occurrences of this verb, their description and analysis, to visualize the verb’s behavior in the language, intending to verify the direction of the linguistics changing occurred and have a wide view about the grammaticalization phenomenon which occurs in Apurinã, more specifically with the verbal form txa.