Volume 71, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Nominalization in Northwest Amazonia

This paper discusses forms, types, and functions of nominalizations in Murui, a Witotoan language spoken in Colombia and Peru. It is concerned with those nominalizations that involve classifiers and those that do not (agentive S/A nominalizations and event nominalizations). Murui nominalizations share a number of noun-like and verb-like properties. While agentive S/A nominalizations and those involving classifiers are more noun-like in nature, event nominalizations are more verb-like.

In this paper I present the types of nominalization in Kakua, a language spoken by a group of hunter-gatherer peoples from the small Kakua-Nukakan family, inhabitants of the Vaupés area in eastern Colombia. I argue that the nominalization strategies in Kakua have developed from a traceable typical Kakua-Nukakan strategy, into a more Vaupés-like profile of expressing nominalizations, where Kakua had added more nominalization strategies in order for the language to adapt to the types of nominalizations found in many of Kakua’s neighboring languages in the Vaupés area. For this, I will first give a description of the nominalization strategies in Kakua, to later compare them to the nominalization strategies in Nukak, Kakua’s sister language spoken outside of the Vaupés area. The paper concludes with a comparison of nominalization in Kakua and the nominalization strategies found in the surrounding languages.

Tariana, an endangered Arawak language of north-western Amazonia (Brazil), has a number of strategies for nominalizing verbs. These include noun classifiers as word-class changing derivational markers, in addition a number of nominalizing suffixes. Nominalizations are a subclass of nouns, with their own set of special properties. As a consequence of areal diffusion from the neighboring and unrelated East-Tucanoan languages, Tariana nominalizations come to be used as complementation and relativization strategies. This is especially so for innovative speakers of Tariana who use Tucano on a daily basis, and whose language bears a strong imprint of Tucano, the main language of the region.

The paper investigates the inventory of nominalizing forms and examines restrictions on the morphosyntactic behavior of lexical and clausal nominalizations in Alto Perené (also called Ashéninka Perené), a Kampa Arawak language of Peru. It is shown that the deverbalization of lexical nominalizations is basically total. The substantivization cline of lexical nominalizations is characterized by various degrees of acquisition of nominal properties. Clausal nominalizations are found to retain aspect and realis marking and preserve argument structure. Clausal realis nominalizations display a variety of nominal characteristics such as spatial case, nominal plural number, and definiteness marking. Clausal irrealis nominalizations show highly restricted nominal properties. The relativization strategy is formed with the help of the participant nominalizers - ri and - ni .

The paper describes the reanalysis of deverbal nominalizations as verbal forms, allowing them to function as predicates of finite and dependent clauses. The paper questions how the reanalyzed forms mark verbal grammatical categories, and data is presented to show that verbal morphology may be marked on a copula, or in some cases directly marked on the nominalization, clearly showing that reanalysis has taken place. The paper also questions what happens to nominal morphology associated with a reanalyzed nominalization, and shows that this too can be reanalyzed and become functionally part of the verbal switch-reference system.

Deverbal nominalizations are often said to occupy an intermediate position between nouns and verbs. Here I describe the morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of three deverbal nominalization strategies in Shiwiar, a Chicham language of Ecuador and Peru. Although nouns and verbs in Shiwiar are clearly distinguished in the grammar, deverbal nominalizations display a combination of both nominal and verbal traits. Furthermore, the three nominalizations types discussed here each have different proportions of noun-like and verb-like characteristics, thereby forming a gradient cline between the two major word classes.