Aspectos morfossintáticos em mebengôkre: transitividade e marcação de argumentos

Abstract

The canonically marked subject in Mẽbêngôkre has already been described in the literature for years, however, the description of a non-canonically marked subject is a field that proves to be very productive itself and still need further exploration. The thematic of the subject which receives different canonical pattern mark is current and relevant as it brings new information to the morphosyntax language knowledge and contributes to the understanding of phenomena that still needs description. The non-canonical subject study intends to raise the discussion on the Mẽbêngôkre subject realization, although there is still a lot remaining to be done for this hypothesis to be definitively confirmed. In this scenario, the main objective of this thesis is to describe the ways in which the subject is marked in Mẽbêngôkre language, focusing on the main strategies used for canonical and non-canonical subjects marking, especially the dative subject, marked by mã postposition and the locative subject, marked by kãm, jã and bê postpositions. The non-canonical subject pattern in Mẽbêngôkre is treated based on tests regarding the coding and behavioral properties of the subject suggested by Keenan (1976); Sigurðsson (2004); Eythórsson; Barddal (2005); Barddal; Eythórsson (2006 and 2009), among other authors. The analysis shown is based on field research material data, acquired through interview recording with indigenous consultants from Mẽbêngôkre villages, placed in the Gorotire reserve, in São Félix do Xingu municipality, southern of Pará state. The methodology is based on test application about the coding properties such as nominal case marking, the argument indexing in the verb and the constituents order in the sentence, and on behavioral properties such as reflexive control, control and erasure in coordinated and subordinate clauses and reference changes. The data showed that, besides the canonically marked subject, there is another subject who is also formally marked by morphemes that are postposition and the morphosyntactic tests performed showed that those subjects are approved in most of the proposed tests, in the dative subject case and in the locative subject in some cases. An argument that supports the prefixes indexed analysis in postpositions as subject is the fact that these prefixes are doubled by the nominative pronoun, as it occurs with the canonically marked subject.