Aspectos morfossintáticos e semânticos da causativização em Parkatêjê

Abstract

Under the view of typological functionalism, the objective of this work is to describe and analyze morphosyntactic and semantic aspects related to the phenomenon of causativization in Parkatêjê (Indigenous language of the Jê family, Macro-Jê stock, and grouped in the Timbira dialect complex). From the morphosyntactic perspective, the causativization is a process related to the increase of verbal valence, that is, to the change of functions and grammatical relations of the arguments of a verb. From the semantic perspective, it consists of a phenomenon associated with the relation of cause and effect, in which a causative verb allows the subject of a sentence to act on another argument, causing it to perform some action or change its state. In the Parkatêjê language, causativization is manifested through the verb to, whose primary meaning is 'to do' and which affects active and stative intransitive verbs. Transitive verbs do not seem to be affected by causativization. The work is based on the theoretical postulates of Givón (1975), Shibatani (1976, 2002), Comrie (1989), Dixon (1994), among others. In addition to being a causative verb, the 'to' element performs other morphosyntactic functions in the language: basic lexical verb 'to do', auxiliary verb, part of verbs root and instrumental postposition. For this reason, this work also presents some aspects related to each of these functions. The methodology used in this work consisted of bibliographical research and field research with data collection performed in the community of the language being studied.