Mental state postpositions in Tiriyó and other Cariban languages

$Id: lt8-1.tex,v 1.5 2004/01/26 19:54:31 eyrich Exp $ |26/1 21:04|131

Mental state postpositions in Tiriyóand other Cariban languages

SÉRGIO MEIRA

Linguistic Typology 8 (2004), 131–159 1430–0532/2004/008-0131c©Walter de Gruyter

Abstract

This paper reports on a class of predicates in Tiriyó and in other Cariban lan-guages which mostly describe emotions or mental states (‘want’, ‘know’, ‘beprotective towards’, ‘believe/trust’, ‘be angry at’, ‘suffer from’, but also ‘su-perior to, more than’) and which have strong affinities with postpositions. Themorphosyntactic properties of these “postpositions” in Tiriyó are describedand compared to other word classes. Their status is shown to be ambiguous;the label “postposition” is kept for these predicates although its adequacy maywell be a question of analytical taste. After a survey of mental state postposi-tions in Tiriyó an overview of similar forms in other Cariban languages isgiven, demonstrating the phenomenon for a considerable portion of the family.In the final conclusion, some hypotheses are advanced as to why such a set ofpostpositions exists in Cariban, and especially in Tiriyó.

Keywords: Cariban, emotions, experiencer constructions, mental states, post-positions, word classes

1. Expressing mental states

The expression of emotion and mental states is a well-known area of typologi-cal diversity in the languages of the world. Meanings such as ‘like’, ‘hate’, ‘be-lieve’, ‘know’, ‘be angry’, ‘fear’, ‘love’, etc. sometimes occur as verbs (as, e.g.,in English), but often as periphrastic expressions based on nouns or adjectives(as, e.g., in Irish). Even when they are verbal, there are often irregular or unex-pected case-marking patterns associated with them, as in Spanish me gusta, En-glish I like it. Some expressions of emotion, given the degree of affectedness oftheir subject, are prototypical examples of experiencer constructions, on whoseirregularities much has been written (Fillmore 1971: 376; Givón 1984: 87–89;Palmer 1994: 40–44; Verma & Mohanan 1990; Croft 1991: 214, 2001: 155;


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in this last quote, Croft even defines “experiencer” as “the subject of a mentalstate”).

The main topic of this paper is the description of a typologically unusual sys-tem for marking mental state (experiencer) arguments: a class of postposition-like predicates in the languages of the Cariban family, a genetic group withseveral dozen languages spoken all over the Amazon region of South Amer-ica. In the Tiriyó (or Trio) language, spoken by approximately 2,000 people inseveral villages on both sides of the Brazil–Surinam border, this set of mentalstate postpositions covers notions such as ‘like’, ‘dislike’, ‘know’, ‘be afraid’,‘admire’, etc. Although at first sight unexpected, such semantic values are per-haps not so strange, since adpositions often mark complex semantic roles inother areas (e.g., space). There is some variation with the argument marked bythese postpositions: most often it is the source of the mental state, but in somecases it can be the experiencer itself. In Section 2, the morphosyntactic prop-erties of these postpositions are described, and also the difficulties involved intheir classification in the word class system. In Section 3, the various mentalstate postpositions of Tiriyó are described in detail. In Section 4, comparabledata from other Cariban languages are reviewed, leading to the conclusion thatthis phenomenon is important for at least a subgroup of the family. Finally,in Section 5, some hypotheses on the causes for the existence of mental statepostpositions are suggested.

2. Word classes in Tiriyó

The two major classes of verbs and nouns are unproblematic in Cariban lan-guages; Tiriyó is no exception. Verbs are clearly distinguishable by virtue oftheir rich tense/aspect/mood, person, and number morphology. There are alsomany class-changing affixes (nominalizers and adverbializers) that occur ex-clusively on verb stems. A few examples of verb-based words are given in (1),with verb-specific affixes romanized.1

(1) a. mi-tuuka-ta-hki2A-hit-FUT-COLL

‘You all will beat him/her/it.’

1. The transcription used in the present work follows the most frequent Tiriyó spelling system(used in Surinam), the only difference being that long vowels (not marked in the Surinamsystem) are here represented by sequences of identical vowels (aa, ee, etc.). The list belowcontains the IPA equivalents of all transcription symbols. For further details on Tiriyó phonol-ogy and dialectal variation, see Meira 1997, 1999a: 30–108.a [a]; e [e]∼[E]; i [i]; o [o]∼[O]; u [u]; ï [1]∼[W]; ë [@]∼[2]; p [p]; t [t]; k [k]; s [ç]∼[S];sometimes [s]; h [h]; sometimes [x]; m [m]; n [n] ([N] word-finally and before k); r [ó]∼[Õ]; w[V]∼[B]; j [j]. The clusters ht, hp, hk are pronounced [ht], [hF]∼[:F] and [hx]∼[hh]∼[:h], orthen [:t], [:p], [:k], depending on the dialect. ([:] marks vowel lengthening.)


Mental state postpositions 133

b. ji-tuuka-to1O-beat-CIRC.NZR

‘something for beating me; my being beaten’c. in-tuuka-ewa

3.NEG-beat-NEG

‘not beating him/her/it’

Nouns, though less obviously definable than verbs, are still easy to dis-tinguish. There are several qualifying suffixes not found on any other wordclasses: diminutive, augmentative, predilective (‘very good’, or ‘favorite’ N),past/devaluative (‘ex-N’), etc.; cf. examples in (2) with affixes specific to nounsromanized.

(2) a. ji-maja-sepï1-knife-PRDL

‘my best/favorite knife’b. maja-pisi

knife-DIM

‘little knife’c. maja-mpë

knife-PAST

‘ex-knife; something that used to be a knife.’

Most nouns can also bear possessor-marking personal prefixes, but this prop-erty is (i) not exclusive to nouns, since the same prefixes occur on postpositionsand on verbs, and (ii) not valid for all nouns, since some of them appear to benon-possessible (a group which includes the pronouns).

Syntactically, nouns and verbs behave as expected. Verb words basically ex-press predication, while noun words fill argument slots in predicates (3a, b).Nouns can also form genitive phrases with other nouns (3c), adverbial (postpo-sitional) phrases with postpositions (3b, d), and also an OV phrase with transi-tive verbs with 3rd person participants (3e).2 These possibilities are not avail-able to any other word class.

2. The OV phrase is constituted only by an O NP (single noun, noun + particle, genitive phrase)followed by a transitive verb with only 3rd person arguments. The O slot in this phrase isoccupied either by the O NP, or, if it is absent, by a prefix n- (cf. i.a–c below). This fact canbe used as a test for nominal status: if a nominal is placed in front of a 3rd person verb stem,it can form an OV phrase with it, but a non-nominal (e.g., an adverb) cannot (cf. d, e).

(i) a. n-eta3A3P-hear.PAST

‘He/she/it heard him/her/it.’b. pahko

1.fathern-eta3A3P-hear.PAST

‘My father heard him/her/it.’


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(3) a. ji-pawana1-friend

n-ëënïï-jan3S-sleep-PRES

‘My friend is sleeping.’b. maja

knifew-ekarama-ne1A-give-PAST

[wëriwoman

ja]PP

DAT

‘I gave (long ago) a knife to (the) woman.’c. [pahko

1.fatheri-pakoro]GenP

3-house‘my father’s house’

d. t-ëturu-ja-e1S-talk-PRES-CTY

[tarënoTiriyó

pë]PP

about‘I am talking about (a) Tiriyó (person).’

e. manko1.mother

[oroicashew

enee-jan]OV

bring-PRES

‘My mother is bringing cashew fruit(s).’

A third easily identifiable group of words is the class of PARTICLES, whichhave no morphology of any kind. They can be subclassified: there are gram-matical particles (conjunctions like këpëewa ‘but’, subordinators like ahtao‘when’, second-position particles like mo ‘Irrealis’, tahkarë ‘could it be that. . . ?’,to ‘they’, scope particles like rë ‘emphatic’) and lexical particles (sentenceequivalents like owa ‘no’, interjections like pëë ‘oh! (surprise)’, ideophoneslike tonton ‘cough’, the latter usually co-occurring with the verb ka ‘say, do’,i.e., ‘to say tonton’ = ‘to cough’). They will not be further considered here.

The remaining words, however, present certain problems of classification,given the fact that the various properties to which they are sensitive do not allcorrelate. Let us consider a few salient groups.

First, there are the ADVERBS, a group which includes traditional adverbialconcepts (i.e., locatives like taanë ‘there’, temporals like menjaarë ‘now, to-day’, manner words like sameken ‘fast’, etc.), but also words that correspond toIndo-European adjectives (e.g., kure ‘good’, sikinme ‘black’, tïkorooje ‘white’,

c. [pahko1.father

eta]OVhear.PAST

‘He/she/it heard my father.’d. kawë

highn-ene3A3P-see.PAST

‘He/she/it looked (up) high.’e. *kawë

highenesee.PAST

f. [kawë-nohigh-NZR

ene]OVsee.PAST

‘He/she/it saw at the high/tall one.’



onken ‘calm, quiet’). This class is basically characterized by having nominal-ization as its only morphological possibility: it does not take person markers(unlike nouns) nor tense/aspect/mood markers (unlike verbs). The nominalizedadverb refers usually to an entity having the property specified by the orig-inal adverb (4a–c), but reference to the corresponding abstract property (the“scale” for the original adverb) is also possible, when they are possessed (4d).Note that the nominalizing suffix is not always the same. None of its forms canoccur on verbs (which take different nominalizers); they can, however, occuron postpositions (cf. below).

(4) a. kawë-nohigh-NZR

‘a high/tall one’b. tïkorooja-n

white-NZR

‘a white one’c. pena-to

long.ago-NZR

‘an ancient one’d. i-kawë-no

3-high-NZR

‘its height’ (e.g., an airplane)

Since both adjectival and adverbial notions are found in this class, it would,in principle, be possible to use the label “adjective” for it, a solution preferredin the analysis of some other Cariban languages (cf. Hoff 1968 for Karinya,also known as Carib, a Cariban language of Surinam). However, the most pro-totypical typological property of adjectives – the capacity to modify a nounsyntactically – is not valid for Tiriyó monomorphemic adverbs. They basicallyoccur as copular complements (5b) or adjuncts to other verbs (5a). Pragmati-cally, the problem of further enriching the meaning of a given noun is solvedby the use of NOMINALIZED adverbs, understood as coreferential to the nounand usually placed in its vicinity, but without forming a phrase: the noun andthe nominalized adverb are like nouns in apposition (5c). Because of this, thelabel “adverb” is preferred here. (The fact that adverbs can be predicated tonouns does not seem to be enough to rule out the label “adverbs”, since non-adjectives can also be predicated to nouns in English, like the locative adverbhere or the prepositional phrase at the station).

(5) a. aerëtruly

mï-ka2S-say.PAST

‘You told the truth.’


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b. aerëtrue

nai3.COP

‘He/she/it is true.’c. wëri,

womankawë-no,tall-NZR

n-ee-jan3S-come-PRES

‘The tall woman is coming.’

A second group is formed by stems that can be named (prototypical) POST-POSITIONS. The members of this group are characterized by their capacityto form a postpositional phrase (PP), which has the same syntactic propertiesas the adverbs mentioned above: it can be a copular complement (6b), andit can also be an adjunct to other verbs (6a, 3d). Postpositions can form PPsby either taking a nominal (NP) argument (6a–b), or by taking person- andnumber-marking prefixes (Table 1). The person-marking prefixes are the samethat occur on nouns to mark the possessor, and on transitive verbs to mark thedirect object (and also on some intransitive verbs to mark the subject; cf. Meira2000b for a discussion of the resulting pseudo-active/stative case-marking pat-tern). The number-marking prefix -:ne, which must co-occur with a personprefix, is not found on verbs or nouns (and, of course, also not on adverbs,since they do not take arguments); it is a distinctive feature of this class. Fur-thermore, postpositions, like adverbs, can be nominalized, and with the samesuffixes (6c, d).

(6) a. papa2.father

w-ene1A3P-see.PAST

pakorohouse

taoCOP

‘I saw your father in the house.’b. pakoro

housetaoCOP

wae1.COP

‘I am in the house.’c. pakoro

housetao-nCOP-NZR

‘one who is in the house’d. ji-pëe-n

1-ABL-NZR

‘one from me’

A third group is that of the mental state postpositions, here exemplified byeire ‘angry at’ and further described in Section 3. They can take nominal ar-guments (7b) or person-marking prefixes, like postpositions, and also the samenumber-marking suffix -:ne (7a). They can be nominalized, usually taking thesuffix -to (7d) (-no occasionally occurs), also found on some adverbs. Addition-ally, mental state postpositions (with one exception: the desiderative se) havean argumentless form which can occur by itself like an adverb, without person



Table 1. Tiriyó postpositions: Full conjugation of the ablative, exemplified by pëe

ji-pëe ‘from me’ kï-pëe ‘from us (1+2, dual inclusive)’kï-pëe-ne ‘from us (inclusive)’

ë-pëe ‘from you’ ë-pëe-ne ‘from all of you’i-pëe ‘from him/her/it’ i-pëe-ne ‘from all of them’

marking or a preceding nominal; this property is not valid for the prototypicalpostpositions, and is clearly related to the non-possessed form of nouns: in bothcases, the same initial ablaut (e > ë change) indicates the absence of an argu-ment (compare 7c with j-ewa ‘my rope’, ëwa ‘rope (non-possessed)’). Syn-tactically, mental state postpositions occur in copular sentences (7a–b). Theycannot be used with other verbs, unless some form of the copula (e.g., a nomi-nalization) occurs (7e).

(7) a. k-ëiree-ne1+2-IRAS-COLL

nai3.COP

‘He is angry at all of us.’b. ë-pawana

2-friendeireIRAS

wae1.COP

‘I am angry at your friend.’c. ëire

IRAS

nai3.COP

‘He/she/it is wild.’d. j-eira-to

1-IRAS-NZR

‘one who is angry at me’e. nï-tën

3S-go.PAST

paaway

j-eire1-IRAS

i-wei3-COP.NZR

keINSTR

‘He went away because he was angry at me.’ (* nï-tën pa j-eire)

A fourth group of interest comprises certain deverbal derivations: the NEG-ATIVE and the SUPINE or PURPOSE-OF-MOTION forms. There are other dever-bal forms that could be included (marking posteriority, simultaneity, etc.), withproperties that do not always coincide with those of the negative and supineforms; for simplicity’s sake, however, we will limit ourselves to the latter two.They can take nominal arguments (8a, b), the same person-marking prefixesas the postpositions (8c, d), with the exception of the 3rd person prefix onthe negative form, which is in- instead of i (8b, 1c). They take also the samenumber-marking suffix -:ne (8c, d). Like mental state postpositions, they havean argumentless form (8e, f), although its status for the supine form is dubi-


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ous: not all speakers accept it. The negative form, like the postpositions, has anominal counterpart with the suffix -pïn, i.e., it can be nominalized (8g); thisis not true for the supine form. Syntactically, the negative form occurs only incopular sentences (8b, d, f); the supine form, on the other hand, occurs only asan adjunct to a verb of motion (8a, c).

(8) a. ë-pawana2-friend

eta-ehear-SUP

wï-të-e1S-go-PRES

‘I am going (there) to hear your friend.’b. ë-pawana

2-friendin-eta-ewa3.NEG-hear-NEG

wae1.COP

‘I don’t hear your friend.’c. ë-eta-e-ne

2-hear-SUP-COLL

wï-të-e1S-go-PRES

I am going (there) to hear all of you.’d. ë-eta-ewaa-ne

3.NEG-hear-NEG-COLL

wae1.COP

‘I don’t hear you all.’e. ?ponoo-se

tell-SUP

nï-tën3S-go-PRES

‘He is going (there) to tell (gossip, etc.).’f. (ë)ta-ewa

hear-NEG

nai3.COP

‘He is deaf; he doesn’t obey.’g. kï-ponoh-pïn

1+2-tell-NEG.NZR

‘one who does not tell about us; one who does not turn us in’

Finally, it is necessary to mention that there are some less prototypical post-positions that may be on their way towards becoming suffixes. These are thegeneral locative po, the essive (or denominalizer) me, and the instrumental ke.These postpositions do not take person- and number-marking affixes.3 Po andme form phrases with NPs which can be nominalized (9f, g) and occur bothas copular complements (9b, d) and as adjuncts to other verbs (9a, c). Ke alsoforms phrases with NPs, but these phrases typically occur only as adjuncts (9e),not as copular complements. Furthermore, ke-phrases usually resist nominal-ization.4

3. Cf. Section 3 for the (quite discussable) possibility that po might have an allomorph epocapable of taking person-marking prefixes.

4. “Usually”, because there are certain ke-phrases which do allow nominalization. For instance,pïi ke ‘ashamed’ (from pïi ‘shame’, a noun stem almost never found by itself) and nari ke‘afraid’ (in which nari is apparently an irregular form of enari ‘fear’, also not usually found



(9) a. mëeDEM

w-apëi1A3P-take.PAST

ji-pï1-wife

meESS

‘I took this (woman) as my wife.’b. pawana

friendmeESS

nai3.COP

‘He/she/it is friendly (i.e., not aggressive).’c. pata

villagepoCOP

n-ëënïï-jan3S-sleep-PRES

‘He is sleeping in the village.’d. pata

villagepoCOP

nai3.COP

‘He is in the village.’e. maja

knifekeINSTR

w-ahkëë-ja-e1A3P-cut-PRES-EVID

‘I am cutting it with a knife.’f. pata po-n

‘a villager’g. pawana ma-n

‘a friendly one’

Table 2 summarizes the discussion of the various morphosyntactic propertiesthus far. As one can see, it is difficult to decide where to draw class boundarieshere. Unlike nouns and verbs, the groups mentioned in Table 2 are conver-gently identified by different properties. In fact, there are no two propertiesthat identify the same set of stems, so that, if all properties are to be adequatelydescribed, all those groups should be recognized at some level. However, froman intuitive perspective, there are simply too many groups, and too many sharedfeatures between neighboring groups (a sort of “family resemblance”), for themto be comfortably separated as different classes; one intuitively feels that thereshould be a hierarchical organization here. Unfortunately, as Croft (2001: 63–107) points out, there are no theoretical guidelines to decide how to organizethem hierarchically. Should one have only one major separation (between, e.g.,“adverbs” and “postpositions”) or more than one (e.g., “adverbs”, “postposi-tions”, and “participials” = supine and negative forms)? If one adopts one majorseparation, should “adverbs” and “postpositions” be distinguished by Property2, i.e., the capacity to take person marking affixes? (This would imply that neg-ative and supine deverbals are postpositions, while me ‘essive’, po ‘locative’

by itself) can be nominalized: pïi ka-to ‘one who is ashamed’, nari ka-to ‘one who is afraid’.This stands in marked contrast to maja ke ‘with the knife’, for which no nominalized counter-part * maja ka-to exists. Considering the rarity of the noun stems pïi and enari, it seems bestto consider pïi ke and nari ke as cases of lexicalization, on their way to becoming monomor-phemic adverbs (pïike, narike).


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Table 2. A summary of morphosyntactic properties for non-noun/verb word classes. ✓

= applies to all; ✓/✓ = defines proper subclasses; (✓) = does not apply to all; ✓? =doubtful

Properties mentalstateP’s

neg.form

seDESID

betterP’s

supineform

me ESS,po COP

keINSTR

adverbs

1. Forms phraseswith NPs

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ×

2. Forms phraseswith personprefixes

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ × × ×

3. Can benominalized(-to,-no, -pïn,etc.)

✓/✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ × ✓ × ✓/✓

4. Hasargumentlessform

✓ ✓ × × (✓) × ×

5. Takes -:ne as amarker ofcollective

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ × ×

6. Phrases can becopularpredicates

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ × ✓ × ✓

7. Phrases can beverb adjuncts

× × × ✓ × ✓ ✓ ✓

8. Phrases can bemotion verbadjuncts

× × × ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓? ✓

9. Has irregular3rd-person prefix

× ✓ × × × × × ×

and ke ‘instrumental’ are not.) Should Property 1 be used, i.e., the capacity toturn NPs into adverbials? (Same as above, with me, ke, po this time being alsopostpositions.) Should Property 3 – nominalizability – be chosen? (This wouldcreate a big class of “adverbials” or “adjuncts”, including the adverbs and mostother groups, but excluding the supine form and the instrumental ke.)

It may indeed be the case that the organization that one could give to thisset would be more a matter of analytical taste than a point of great theoreticalimportance. Given the family resemblance between the various groups, theywill all be treated here as belonging to a large group of ADVERBIALS. This



group will be further subdivided into two classes, ADVERBS (non-argument-taking adverbials) and RELATORS (argument-taking adverbials). Within rela-tors, supine and negative forms will be then separated out, as forming indepen-dent groups ( DEVERBALS); the remaining groups will be called POSTPOSI-TIONS.

In this view, mental state stems are postpositions. They are argument-taking,nominalizable adverbials, distinguishable from others by the presence of anargumentless form (also an adverbial, from the subclass of adverbs). It maybe argued that the fact that they occur only as copular complements speaksagainst their postpositional status. To this, one may counterargue that thereare other adverbials which are restricted to copular sentences: for instance,more property-like adverbs like color terms (sikinme ‘black’, tïkorooje ‘white’,taamiire ‘red’, etc.). If one considers the restriction to copular sentences a rea-son not to include mental state stems in the subgroup of postpositions, thenone would also have to exclude color terms from the subgroup of adverbs andthus separate them from other stems such as sameken ‘fast’, kure ‘good, pretty,well’, aerë ‘true’, etc. (Notice that this difference corresponds, in English, tothe fact that color adjectives do not have a corresponding manner adverbialform: * blackly, *whitely, *redly, etc., unlike other adjectives.)

Of course, the division proposed here should not be taken as implying deepconceptual divides in the Tiriyó lexicon. In fact, the non-convergence of thevarious properties listed in Table 2 suggests that there are no “major classes”here to be distinguished; all classifications will be a matter of descriptive con-venience. It is in these terms that this classification is proposed here.

A final note may be added about the label “postposition”. Adpositions (touse a more general term) are a neglected class in typological studies: most ty-pologies of part-of-speech systems do not even mention them, or then onlycasually, as “case markers”, or as “syntactic adverbializers”. There have beenstudies on the semantics of specific adpositions (‘in’, ‘on’, ‘over’, etc.), but noconsiderations on the adpositional class as a whole. After all, why are there ad-positions? Why do some languages have a special group of adpositions, whileothers do not? These questions have, to the best of my knowledge, never beenaddressed in the literature. In Tiriyó, the “prototypical postpositions” wouldbe accepted as such by any analyst: they include a number of specific spatiallocatives (two ‘in’s, two ‘on’s, and also ‘under’, ‘over’, ‘on top of’, etc.) and di-rectionals (‘from’, ‘to’, etc.), and also grammatical roles (dative, causee). Theyapproach the prototypical idea that postpositions “create multi-word adverbs”,that they turn NPs into adverbials of some sort. However, Table 2 shows thatthe properties of these postpositions extend unequally to neighboring classes,in such a way that criterial decisions are hard to make. This is a phenomenonnot unknown to other adpositional systems (e.g., German, in which words liketrotz ‘despite’, (an)statt ‘instead of’, gemäss ‘according to’, historically of


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nominal origin, are classified as prepositions, although they deviate from moreprototypical elements like in, auf, über in several respects – e.g., interestingly,they are not used as copular complements), and has probably something to dowith the above questions about the adpositional category – which, here, arebest left unanswered.

3. Mental state postpositions in Tiriyó

The complete set of Tiriyó postpositions is relatively large: there are approx-imately 100 members, with the set of spatial postpositions, i.e., those that ex-press static location and motion, being especially elaborate (about 50 mem-bers). Although there might be more members of this class that did not occurin the available corpus, there are no productive processes for deriving postpo-sitions: they apparently form a closed class.

The subclass of mental state postpositions is semantically defined as com-posed by elements that indicate notions which usually take an experiencer ar-gument that typically express feelings or mental states; note, however, that onecommon semantic subgroup of experiencer predicates – those denoting percep-tion (‘see’, ‘hear’, ‘smell’, etc.) – are not in this class in Tiriyó. Mental statepostpositions, as discussed in Section 2, have the following properties:(i) they typically occur as copular predicates, usually with the experiencer

of the mental state as the subject of the copula and the ‘experienced’ asthe argument of the postposition (10a–b; but the opposite order occurs in10c);

(ii) they can take person-marking prefixes, and also the collective-markingsuffix -:ne, typical of adverbials;

(iii) they are all nominalizable, usually with the suffix -to (except for epo‘enough’ and epona ‘believing, trusting’, which take -no; a few othersapparently oscillate between -no and -to);

(iv) they usually have an argumentless form, which is prefixless for consonant-initial stems and undergoes ablaut (e > ë) for e-initial stems (the desider-ative se ‘want’ exceptionally does not have an argumentless form; thesame may be true for ino ‘afraid of’ and wae ‘superior to’).

Some examples of typical sentences with experiencer postpositions are in(10); all known mental state postpositions in Tiriyó, to be exemplified and dis-cussed subsequently, are listed in Table 3.

(10) a. tunawater

seDESID

wae1.COP

‘I want water (for drinking, bathing, etc.).’b. ëkëi

snakeinoAPPRH

mana-n?2.COP-DBT

‘Are you afraid of snakes?’



Table 3. List of experiencer postpositions

Meaning Form

Desiderative (‘want, like’) seCognoscitive (‘know’) waarëIgnorative (‘not know’) wame(ke)Protective (‘pity, jealous’) pïïnëApprehensive (‘afraid of’) inoSuperioritive (‘more’) waeIrascitive (‘angry, wild’) eireOdiative (‘hate’) aame(ke)Appreciative (‘admire’) ewaajeDifficultative (‘hard’) enkuumeFidelitive (‘trust, believe’) eponaSatisfactive (‘enough’) epo

c. ë-waarë2-COGN

wan?1.COP.DBT

‘Do you know me?’

The desiderative postposition se is used to express the idea of ‘wanting, de-siring, needing’. So (11c) can be used to express sexual impulses (‘I desireyou’), or simply a general desire or need to see the interlocutor (‘I want (totalk) to you; I need you, e.g., to help me’). Note that this postposition hasan irregular stem allomorph je when taking person-marking prefixes (cf. theparadigm in Table 4).

(11) a. pakorohouse

seDESID

nai3.COP

‘3P wants/needs a house.’b. ë-ene

2-see-NZR

seDESID

nai3.COP

anja1+3

‘We (excl.) want to see you.’c. ë-je

2-DESID

wae1.COP

‘I want you.’

The cognoscitive and ignorative postpositions waarë and wame(ke) expressthe idea of ‘knowing’ or ‘not knowing’. The argument of these postpositions isthe experiencer (i.e., the “knower” or “not-knower”, “ignorer”). The argument-less forms waarë and wame(ke) mean respectively ‘understandable, clear’ and


144 Sérgio Meira

Table 4. Paradigm of the desiderative postpostion with person-marking prefixes

ji-je ‘wanting me’ kï-je ‘wanting the two of us’kï-jee-ne ‘wanting all of us’

ëi-je ‘wanting you’ ë-jee-ne ‘wanting all of you’i-je ‘wanting him/her/it’ i-jee-ne ‘wanting all of them’

‘difficult, hard to understand’. There is also a further related adverb tïwaarë‘careful; worried; jealous’.

(12) a. irë3.IN.ANA

kï-waarëë-ne1+2-COGN-COLL

menjaarënow

‘Now(adays) we all know this.’b. irë

3.IN.ANA

nai,3.COP

kï-wamekee-ne1+2-IGNOR-COLL

‘This we do not know.’c. ji-waarë

1-COGN

manae2.COP

‘I know you.’d. ji-wame

1-IGNOR

karaiwaBrazilian

i-jomi3-words

‘I do not know the language of the Brazilians.’

The protective postposition pïïnë expresses the general feeling that one hasfor something or someone that one cares about or wishes to protect. In actualuses, it describes feelings such as, e.g., the one a mother has for her children,the Christian God for his creation (e.g., us) – ‘compassion’, ‘empathy’ – andalso the feeling of jealousy of a husband for his wife, or the feeling of protec-tion that one may have for his dearest belongings (which leads to, for instance,denying access to it to untrustworthy people). It has both a “nice” component(the experiencer “cares about” the argument of pïïnë) and an “aggressive” one(the experiences “will not grant access to” the argument very easily, s/he “willbecome angry” if access is requested by unknown people). Note, in (13a), theoptional occurrence of the 3rd person prefix i-.

(13) a. ji-pawana1-friend

(i-)pïïnë(3-)PROT

wae1.COP

‘I pity / I will protect my friend.’ (= I care about him, I won’t lethim down.)

b. kï-pïïnëë-ne1+2-PROT-COLL

nai,3.COP

kanGod

‘God is on our side.’ (=God cares about us.)



The apprehensive postposition ino expresses the idea of fear with respectto its argument. The expression nari ke (historically ‘fear-INSTR’, possibly al-ready lexicalized) ‘afraid of’, apparently synonymous with ino, occurs in a dif-ferent syntactic frame (the cause of fear, which is the argument of the postposi-tion ino, occurs with nari ke as the argument of a general “theme” postpositionpë(kë) ‘about, concerning’; cf. 14c).

(14) a. ëkëisnake

inoAPPRH

wae1.COP

‘I am afraid of snakes.’b. kï-noo-ne

1+2-APPRH-COLL

mëe3.AN.PRX

‘That (person) is afraid of us all.’c. ëkëi

snakepëabout

narifear

keINSTR

wae1.COP

‘I am afraid of snakes.’

The superioritive postposition wae codifies the idea of ‘superior to; big-ger than; stronger than; more than [its argument] can handle’. It can be con-trasted with the satisfactive (‘enough’) postposition. The spatial postpositionepoe ‘above’ has occasionally been observed with the same meaning; this sug-gests that wae may have had spatial semantics at some point in the past.

(15) a. ji-wae1-SUPER

manae2.COP

‘You are bigger/stronger than me; you are more than I can han-dle.’

b. paitapir

i-wae3-SUPER

t-ee-sePAST-COP-PAST

wïraapabow

‘The bow was superior to the tapir; the tapir could not resist thebow.’

The irascitive postposition eire expresses the idea of ‘angry/mad at; wild at’its argument. The argumentless adverb ëire means ‘wild; not tame; not civi-lized; dangerous’.

(16) a. j-eire1-IRAS

nai3.COP

‘He/she/it is angry at me.’b. eiree-ne

3-IRAS-COLL

wae1.COP

‘I am angry at all of them.’


146 Sérgio Meira

The odiative postposition aame(ke) expresses a stronger dislike towards itsargument than eire: ‘is very angry at; hates’. It is not used very frequently, andsome remarks from native speakers suggest that it may be dialectal.

(17) a. j-aame1-ODI

nai3.COP

‘He/she/it is very angry at / hates me.’b. k-aamekee-ne

1+2-ODI-COLL

nai3.COP

‘He/she/it is very angry at / hates all of us.’

The appreciative postposition ewaaje indicates positive feelings towards itsargument: the experiencer is ‘glad; happy; satisfied’ with it. The argumentlessadverb ëwaaje (or waaje) means ‘who is a nice person; kind-hearted; who treatsothers well’.

(18) a. ë-ewaaje2-APPRC

wae1.COP

kutumaINTNS

‘I am very happy / satisfied with you.’b. j-entu

1-chiefnai,3.COP

j-ewaaje1-APPRC

‘My boss likes / is happy with / is satisfied with me.’

The difficultative postposition enkuume, like waarë and wame(ke), takes theexperiencer as its argument. It indicates that the experiencer finds something(which occurs as the subject of the clause) difficult to understand. The adverbantïïnao ‘deep (water, etc.); difficult (to understand)’ can be used as a synonym(19b). Note that this is different from ‘difficult to carry out’, which is expressedby the adverb amïima(ka) ‘heavy; difficult (to do)’ (19c).

(19) a. j-enkuume1-DIFF

nai,3.COP

ë-jomi2-words

‘Your language is difficult for me.’b. antïïnao

difficultnai,3.COP

ë-jomi,2-words

wïja1.DAT

‘Your language is difficult for me.’c. amïima

difficultnai,3.COP

ë-joroko,2-work

wïja1.DAT

‘Your work is difficult for me (to do).’

The fidelitive and satisfactive postpositions epona and epo appear to be re-lated to each other, and maybe also to the directional postpostion pona ‘to(wards)’and to the general locative postposition po ‘on; at’. The most frequent uses ofepona and epo involve experiencers: epona expresses ‘trust’ or ‘belief’ in its



argument by the subject of the clause (20a, b), while epo indicates that thesubject of the clause is ‘enough; sufficient’ to its argument (compare with thesuperioritive postposition above). Thus, (20c) can be used to say that a shoe fitsthe experiencer’s foot well, or that a certain pair of glasses is the right kind tocorrect his/her handicap, or that a certain amount of food is enough to satisfyhim/her, or that a certain amount of money is sufficient payment.

(20) a. kanGod

eponaFIDEL

kït-a-ti1+2-COP-COLL

‘We all trust/believe in God.’b. k-ëponaa-ne

1+2-FIDEL-COLL

too3.COLL

nai3.COP

‘They trust/believe in all of us.’c. j-epo

1-SATIS

nai3.COP

‘(This) is enough/sufficient for me.’d. ë-epoo-ne

2-SATIS-COLL

nai3.COP

‘(This) is enough for all of you.’e. j-epona

1-towardn-ee-jan3S-come-PRES

‘He/she/it is coming in my direction.’f. pakoro

houseponatoward

n-ee-jan3S-come-PRES

‘He/she/it is coming to(ward) the house.’g. epo

SATIS

ëë-ja?2-DAT

‘Is that OK with you?’

With person prefixes, epona is actually ambiguous between directional (‘to-wards’) and fidelitive (‘trusting’) meanings. Usually, the directional meaning,as one might expect, co-occurs with motion verbs, as in (20e), while the fi-delitive meaning co-occurs with the copula, as in (20a). Observing this, onemight be led to think that epona is actually the person-marked form of thedirectional postposition pona, and that the fidelitive uses are metaphorical(‘coming towards me’ → ‘favorable to me’ → ‘believing/trusting in me’). Itis quite probable that a historical connection exists between pona and epona;there are, however, two reasons to consider them as synchronically independentpostpositions: (i) with overt NP arguments, only pona can have the directionalmeaning, and only epona can have the fidelitive meaning, i.e., they contrastin this environment (thus epona cannot occur in (20f), and pona is likewiseimpossible in (20a)); (ii) there is a derived argumentless form of the fidelitivepostposition, ëpona ‘naive; credulous; always ready to help others’, which is


148 Sérgio Meira

also true for most of the other experiencer postpositions but not for any otherdirectional postposition.

The form of the postposition epo is very similar to epona, and it also looksrelated to the general locative po ‘on; at’ in a similar way to epona and the di-rectional pona (i.e., a formative initial element e-). In fact, po, like pona, lackspersonal-marked forms, which might lead one to think that epo is actually thestem form of po which can take person-marking prefixes (notice also that epo,unlike epona, has no argumentless form – no *ëpo seems to exist –, whichwould agree with the idea that it is not really an independent experiencer post-position, but simply a form of the locative po). However, unlike epona, therenever seems to be any shred of locative meaning associated with the uses ofepo: the 1st person form j-epo from (20c) could never mean ‘on me; at me’,but only ‘enough for me’. Furthermore, there are occasions in which epo oc-curs without any person-marking prefixes but still with satisfactive (‘enough’)meaning, as in (20g) above, which is often added to the end of suggestions.5

Because of this, it seems better to analyze epo as an independent word, and toconsider the similarities with po, pona, and epona as indications of diachronic,rather than synchronic, connections.

4. Experiencer postpositions in other Cariban languages

In the available descriptions of other languages of this family, no specific atten-tion was paid to experiencer postpositions (nor to marks of emotion in general);Meira (2000a: 80–81) is the first study that mentions them as a group. Table 5contains the results obtained by perusing the available Cariban materials.6 The

5. This type of use is not found with other experiencer postpositions. One could imagine thatepo in (17) actually is the argumentless adverbial form (meaning ‘satisfactory’) rather thanthe actual postposition occurring without a person-marking prefix; it would simply be anirregular form, epo rather than ëpo (which one might try to further justify by saying thatthere is a word ë-po ‘your clothes’ which would be homophonous with, and thus pre-empt,an e>ë-mutated argumentless form of epo – although it must be said that the “threat ofhomophony” is often more of a paper tiger than a real explanation). Alternatively, one mightimagine that epo is really the (zero-marked) 3rd-person form, and that (17), when comparedto (20c, d), simply exemplifies a certain fluctuation in the coding of participants: sometimesthe argument of the postposition epo is the experiencer, and sometimes it is the “experienced”(i.e., epo would sometimes agree with the cognoscitive (‘know’) and ignorative (‘not know’)postpositions in having the experiencer as its argument, and sometimes with the others inhaving the “experienced” as its argument).

6. The transcription of the various sources was normalized here, following the Tiriyó orthogra-phy. So, ï and ë are used to represent [1] and [@] in the languages that have it. For languageswith more than one non-velar fricative or affricate, the symbols s = [s], x = [S], tx = [tS] andf = [F], frequent in that geographic area, are used; for languages with more than one flap,the palatalized one is represented as rj. The symbol j represents a palatal glide (IPA [j]), ña palatal nasal (IPA [ñ]), and ’ a glottal stop (IPA [ĳ]). The sources consulted for each lan-guage are: Derbyshire 1979, 1985 (Hixkaryana), Hawkins 1998 (Waiwai), Koehn & Koehn



Cariban familyGuiana branch:

Taranoan sub-branch: Tiriyó, etc.WayanaApalaíParukotoan sub-branch: Hixkaryana, Waiwai, Katxuyana

Venezuelan branch: Macushi, etc.Southern branch: Bakairi, etc.

Figure 1. Hypothesized genetic relationship between the languages in Table 2

sample of languages is not necessarily representative of the family (in fact, itoveremphasizes the Guianan branch), but rather depends on the extant descrip-tive materials. Figure 1 summarizes the hypothesized genetic relations betweenthe languages in the sample.7

In Hixkaryana, the desiderative, cognoscitive, and ignorative postpositionsseem to have the same range of meanings that they have in Tiriyó (21a–c).Notice, however, the different argument encoding for the ‘know’ postpositions:the argument of jwero ‘know’ and jwenjeke ‘not know’ is not the “knower,”but the “known thing” (21d, e). The postposition eho, despite being formallycloser to Tiriyó epo ‘enough’, seems to be semantically more similar to Tiriyówae ‘more than; greater than’ (21f).

(21) a. kanawacanoe

xeDESID

w-eh-xaha1S-COP-PRES

‘I want a canoe.’ (Derbyshire 1979: 8)b. ro-he-txe

1-wife-POSS

xeDESID


‘I love my wife.’ (Derbyshire 1979: 32)c. ï-xe

3-DESID


‘I love her.’ (Derbyshire 1985: 81)d. ro-jwenjeke

1-IGNOR

naha3.COP

hawanavisitor

1986 (Apalaí), Abbott 1991 and Amodio & Pira 1996 (Macushi), Jackson 1972 and FIRST-NAME Tavares (personal communication) (Wayana), von den Steinen 1892 (Bakairi), SpikeGildea (personal communication), and my own field notes (Tiriyó, Katxuyana, Waiwai). Inall non-Tiriyó examples, the interlinear glosses are mine, while the actual translation is fromthe original author; the page number in the original source is indicated in parentheses aftereach example. Tiriyó data are all from my field work.)

7. It must be noted that no general agreement has been reached yet on the details of the classifi-cation of Cariban languages (see Gildea 1998: 3–11, Meira 2000a: 10–11). Therefore, Figure1 represents a current working hypothesis based on my own ongoing comparative work.


150 Sérgio Meira

Table 5. Experiencer postpositions in other Cariban languages

Tiriyó Hixkaryana Waiwai Apalaí

DESID se ∼ je ‘want;like’

xe ‘want; like’ xe ‘want; love’ se ‘want; like’

COGN waarë ‘know’ jwero ‘know’ wero ‘in sightof’

waro ‘know’

IGNOR wame(ke) ‘notknow’

jwenjeke ‘notknow’

weñekarï ‘notknow’

FIDEL epona ‘toward’;‘trust’

fona ‘toward’;‘trust’

PROT pïïnë ‘caringabout’

fonaro ‘mindfulof’

pïno ‘care for’

SATIS epo ‘enough for’ eho ∼ oho‘greater than’

APPRH ino ‘afraid of’ fona ‘lest’ zuno ‘afraid of’

Katxuyana Wayana Macushi Bakairi

DESID txe ‘want; like’ he ∼ se ‘want;like’

pai, ju’se ‘want’ ze ∼ he ‘want’

COGN enwo ∼ onwo‘know’

(tuwarë ‘know’)

IGNOR onwo taki ‘notknow’

FIDEL pona ‘toward’;‘trust’

APPRH uno ‘afraid of’

‘The visitors did not know me.’ (Derbyshire 1985: 20)e. Mawarje

Mawaryej-exe-thïrïnhïrïREL-COP-PAST.POSS

jweroCOGN

n-a-txhe3S-COP-

toto-komoPRES.COLL person-COLL

‘The people know (what has been told of) Mawarye’s doingslong ago.’ (Derbyshire 1985: 20)

f. kratxatxagrasshopper

j-ohoREL-SUPER

naha3.COP

tukusuhummingbird

‘The hummingbird is bigger than the grasshopper.’ (Derbyshire1979: 67)

In Waiwai, the desiderative and ignorative postpositions seem to have the same



range of meanings as in Tiriyó (22a–c). The postposition wero, however, istranslated as ‘in sight of’, and has apparently more to do with visual percep-tion than with simple knowledge (22e, f); note the existence of the Waiwaiverb htïno(fï) ‘know; understand’ (22d), apparently the true semantic equiva-lent of Tiriyó waarë ‘know’. Interestingly, wero ‘in sight of’, paralleling Tiriyówaarë, and weñekarï ‘not know’, like Tiriyó wame(ke), take the perceiver/knower,not the perceived/known thing, as their argument (22c, e).

(22) a. tuunawater

xeDESID

was1.COP

o-wok-ru1-drink-POSS

‘I want some water to drink.’ (Hawkins 1998: 105)b. aa-xe

2-DESID

wasï1.COP

‘I want (love) you.’ (Hawkins 1998: 105)c. o-weñekarï

1-IGNOR

mok-o3S.come-PAST

‘I did not know when he came.’ (= ‘He came without my know-ing.’) (Hawkins 1998: 108)

d. mï-htïno-ja?2A-know-PRES

‘Do you know him/her/it?’ (own fieldwork)e. Wanawa

Wanawañ-et-wo3S-DETR-shoot-PAST

EwkaEwka

weroin.sight.of

‘Ewka saw Wanawa shoot himself.’ (= ‘Wanawa shot himself insight of Ewka.’) (Hawkins 1998: 106)

f. ero3IN.ANA

waralike

txe-tkeñe,3S.go-PAST.COLL

a-wero2-in.sight.of

roEMPH

rmaself‘That’s how they went, you saw them yourself.’ (Hawkins 1998:221)

The Waiwai postposition fona clearly has the same directional meaning asTiriyó pona (23a). When co-occurring with the verb ‘to see’, however, it hasfidelitive (‘trust’; 23b) or ‘culpabilitive’ (‘blame’; 23c) overtones, probably asthe result of metaphor (e.g., from ‘look towards’ → ‘trust’, or also ‘blame’; itis not known whether the ‘look towards’ meaning exists synchronically or not).In certain contexts (e.g., with nominalized verb stems), it even means ‘lest; forfear that’, which is reminiscent of the Tiriyó apprehensive ino (23d, e). Thepostposition fonaro ‘mindful of’ is apparently closer in meaning to the Tiriyóprotective pïïnë, though its form seems closer to the directional pona (Waiwaifona) (23f).


152 Sérgio Meira

(23) a. mararïfield

fonaDIR

kï-wtxe-sï1S-go-PRES

‘I am going to the field.’ (Hawkins 1998: 103)b. o-fona

2-FIDEL

xaEMPH

en-txo-kosee-COLL-IMPER

‘Trust in me.’ (Hawkins 1998: 32)c. noro

3.AN.ANA

fonaBLAME

w-eeñ-asï1A-see-PRES

‘I blame him.’ (Hawkins 1998: 106)d. efïrka-rï

3.fall-NZR.POSS

fonaLEST

‘for fear of his falling’ (Hawkins 1998: 89)e. txuure

manioc.breadw-ermono-jasï1A-shelter-PRES

kafikarachicken

jaA

ah-rï3.eat- NZR.POSS

fonalest

‘I will put the cassava bread in a shelter for fear that the chickensmight eat it.’ (Hawkins 1998: 58)

The Apalaí desiderative se has the same meanings as its cognates in the otherlanguages (24a–c). The cognitive waro (∼ uaro) ‘know’, like Hixkaryana jwero,takes the “known”, not the “knower”, as its argument (24d). The protective pïno‘cares for’ is apparently the same as Tiriyó pïïnë (though the available Apalaícorpus has only one example, 24f).

(24) a. ï-pï-tï1-wife-POSS

seDESID

kïn-exi-ne3S-COP-PAST

‘He wanted my wife.’ (Koehn & Koehn 1986: 81)b. wïi

maniocseDESID

mana3.COP

‘He likes manioc.’ (Koehn & Koehn 1986: 93)c. o-se

2-DESID

ase1.COP

‘I like you.’ (Koehn & Koehn 1986: 81)d. z-uaro

3-COGN

hkoINTNS

pïraNEG

ase1.COP

‘I don’t know it quite (as well as someone else does).’ (Koehn &Koehn 1986: 112)

e. kanawacanoe

axika-rïcarve-NZR.POSS

waroCOGN

mana3.COP

‘He knows how to carve a canoe.’ (Koehn & Koehn 1986: 107)f. aimo

boypïnoPROT

mana3.COP



‘He cares for the boy.’ (Koehn & Koehn 1986: 36)

Katxuyana txe is similar to the other desideratives seen thus far (25a, b). Thecognoscitive onwo ‘know’, although apparently not cognate with Tiriyó waarë,has the same behavior: it takes the “knower” as its argument (25c, d). No spe-cial ignorative postposition occurred in the available data; rather, the negativeform of the cognoscitive postposition was used to express ‘not knowing’ (25d).(All Katxuyana data are from my personal field notes.)

(25) a. tunawater

txeDESID

wasï1.COP

‘I want water.’b. i-txe

3-DESID

takNEG

wasï1.COP

‘I don’t want it.’c. j-onwo

1-COGN

‘I know (it).’d. j-onwo

1-COGN

takiNEG

‘I don’t know it.’

The Wayana desiderative he ∼ se has the expected meaning of ‘want; like’(26a, b; note that the postpositional collective suffix, corresponding to Tiriyó -:ne, is in Wayana -he). The word tuwarë is not a postposition: it can take neitherperson-marking prefixes nor NP arguments (FIRSTNAME Tavares, personalcommunication); in fact, it is certainly cognate with the Tiriyó adverb tïwaarë‘worried; jealous’, which is related to, but not a form of, the cognoscitive post-position waarë. It co-occurs with the “knower” as subject of the clause, andwith the “known thing” as the argument of a general “theme” postposition pëk‘about’ (26c, d). The apprehensive postposition uno is apparently the same asits Tiriyó counterpart ino (26e). The use of pona (normally a directional post-position, as in (26f)) to indicate trust or belief seems to be restricted to cases ofco-occurrence with the copula (26g).

(26) a. tunawater

heDESID

nai3.COP

emna1+3

‘We, but not you, want water.’ (Jackson 1972: 54)b. ë-he-he

3-DESID-COLL

wai1.COP

‘you all I am wanting’ (Jackson 1972: 58)c. tuwarë

knownkaQP

man?2.COP.DBT


154 Sérgio Meira

‘Do you know (it)?’ (FIRSTNAME Tavares personal communi-cation; own fieldwork)

d. ïhï,yes

tuwarëknow

wai,1.COP

i-pëk3-about

‘Yes, I know about it.’ (FIRSTNAME Tavares personal commu-nication; own fieldwork)

e. j-uno1-APPRH

raNEG

ei-këCOP-IMPER

‘Don’t be afraid of me.’ (Jackson 1972: 74)f. ëutë

villageponaDIR

wï-të-jai1S-go-PRES

‘I am going to the village.’ (own fieldwork)g. kan

GodponaFIDEL

wai1.COP

‘On God I am; I am trusting God.’ (Jackson 1972: 54)

The Macushi and Bakairi material contained only clear cases of the desidera-tive postpositions. In Macushi, there were two desideratives: pai, which occursafter verbs and may be a suffix (27a, b), and ju’se, which occurs after nounsand seems to be (at least by its last syllable) related to the other desideratives(27c).

(27) a. isa’mantadie

paiDESID

wai1.COP

‘I want to die.’ (Abbott 1991: 79)b. tuna

wateranenïdrink

paiDESID

wai1.COP

‘I want to drink water.’ (Amodio & Pira 1996: 199)c. t-aponse

3.REFL-bicycleju’seDESID

u-nmuri1-son

wanï3.COP

penanetomorrow

‘My son wants his bicycle tomorrow.’ (Amodio & Pira 1996:199)

In Bakairi, the desiderative has the form ze ∼ he, and is used as expected (28).

(28) a. xina1+3

i-he3-DESID

‘We want it.’ (von den Steinen 1892: 121, original German trans-lated by me)

b. i-ze3-DESID

w-aki-ne1S-COP-PAST

‘I wanted it.’ (von den Steinen 1892: 121, original German trans-lated by me)



5. Possible sources for experiencer postpositions

After examining a (typologically unusual) system in which a number of “core”emotions and mental states are expressed in several Cariban languages as post-positions in predicate constructions, one naturally feels interested in its source:How did such a class of stems come to exist? Despite the fact that the dataare incomplete – better descriptions of Cariban languages and of their post-positional systems are badly needed –, a few hypotheses can already be putforth.

Looking at Table 5 and the examples from the various languages, it wouldseem that most experiencer postpositions tend to concentrate in languages ofthe Guianan branch, especially in Tiriyó. Of course, the fragmentary natureof the data certainly contributes significantly to this impression: thus far, it sohappens that the best available descriptions are about languages of the Guiananbranch. Nevertheless, there is some evidence in favor of the idea that the Tiriyóset of experiencer postpositions is especially rich.

First, some of the Tiriyó postpositions appear to have non-mental-state et-ymologies, so that their current meaning seems to be relatively recent (e.g.,epona and epo and their possible relation to locatives, mentioned at the end ofSection 3).

Second, the meanings of some of the Tiriyó postpositions are expressed byother means in other Cariban languages. Thus, a number of languages have averb ‘to know’ rather than a cognoscitive postposition (e.g., Waiwai htïnofï,mentioned in (22d); also Tamanaku at-putu (Gilij 1965: 157), Carib of Suri-nam or Kari’ña uku:tï (Hoff 1968: 433), Bakairi utu (von den Steinen 1892:151), Macushi eputï (Amodio & Pira 1996: 201). To add another example, theTiriyó apprehensive ino corresponds to a construction with the directional fonain Waiwai (23d, e). In Hixkaryana, the cognate directional postposition honacan also be used to indicate the source of fear, co-occurring with a verb offearing (29b).

(29) a. owtovillage

honaDIR

mï-te-ko?2S-go-PAST

‘Did you go to the village?’ (Derbyshire 1979: 6)b. k-os-erjeh-jaha

1.S-DETR-scare-PRES

kamarajaguar

honaDIR(?)

‘I am afraid of the jaguar.’ (Derbyshire 1979: 109)

Notice also Wayana pona, which is attested with both directional and fidelitiveuses (26f, g), the co-occurrence of the copula apparently triggering the lattersense.

Considering these facts, there may actually have been a tendency for thecreation (or at least increase in the number) of mental state postposition in the


156 Sérgio Meira

Guianan branch, especially in Tiriyó. As possible sources for these postposi-tions, one might mention:(i) Adverbial constructions/phrases based on nouns. Notice that, even in

Tiriyó, there are some cases of postpositional phrases with nouns thatcome close to the semantic area of mental state postpositions (e.g., narike ‘afraid’ and pïi ke ‘ashamed’, from the – otherwise rarely used – nounspïi ‘shame’ and enari ‘fear’). Assuming that such nouns were possessible,a reanalysis of a noun + postposition sequence as a single postposition(not unlike, e.g., English in-side) would lead in one single step to a lexi-calized mental state adposition. A final element would be the extension ofthe collective marker -:ne, not found on nouns, to the new postposition.Notice that this nominal source might explain why certain consonant-initial mental mental state (and also locative) postpositions sometimesoccur with a 3rd person prefix i- even when preceded by a nominal ar-gument (like pïïnë in 13a above): since possessive phrases in Tiriyó areof the ‘John his-house’ kind (cf. 3c above), the occurrence of this i- onpostpositions is highly suggestive of a nominal origin.

(ii) Adverbial constructions based on verbs. In Section 2, two deverbal formswere considered: the negative and the supine (purpose-of-motion). Theseare not the only deverbal forms that exist in Tiriyó: there are also formsmarking other circumstances (posteriority, simultaneity, etc.). As was notedin Section 2, these forms often take person-marking prefixes, and also, asadverbials, the collective marker -:ne. It thus seems possible that somemental state postpositions might have arisen from one of the adverbialforms of a mental state verb stem which was subsequently lost. In that re-spect, it is interesting to notice that the appreciative postposition ewaajeends in -je, which is also one of the forms of the supine suffix.

In this context, it is interesting to mention that the mental state postpositionsall correspond to English complement-taking adjectives, usually indicated bya preposition (angry AT/WITH, desirous OF, caring TOWARD, (un)known TO,afraid OF, superior TO, admiring OF, trustful OF, content WITH, hateful TO-WARD, difficult FOR, etc.). These adjectives are frequently derived from nom-inal or verbal sources (desire, know, fear, admire, trust, hate), as may havebeen the case with the Cariban mental state postpositions.

The only apparent exception, with cognates in most Cariban languages withgood descriptions (and thus with good chances of being old, perhaps Proto-Cariban) is the desiderative. It is a short element, composed basically of africative or affricate plus the vowel e (se, xe, txe, he, ze) and shows up inmost branches of the family. It is quite difficult to find a nominal and/or ver-bal source for this postposition. Apparently, Cariban languages have, for quitea while, expressed ‘wanting’, ‘needing’, or ‘loving’ with a postposition ratherthan a verb or a noun; only a couple of languages appear to have ‘want’ verbs



(e.g., Tamanaku ipi-ri, from Gilij 1965: 154; apparently Ikpeng also has sucha verb [Spike Gildea, personal communication]).8 Thus, as far as the currentlyavailable evidence goes, the desiderative has always been a mental state post-position. One might suggest that it may have been, at some point in Pre-Proto-Cariban history, a postposition with non-mental-state semantics. For instance,benefactive/‘goal’ markers apparently sometimes show desiderative-like uses(e.g., for meaning ‘in favor of’, as in I am for this decision or I’ll go for it); itdoes not seem impossible that a similar Pre-Proto-Cariban postposition mighthave evolved into a desiderative (I want/like water < I am/go for water). In theabsence of any supporting evidence, however, this hypothesis remains specu-lative.

Received: 22 October 2001 Max Planck Institute for PsycholinguisticsRevised: 10 February 2003 Universiteit Leiden

Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi

Correspondence address: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, NL-6525 XDNijmegen, The Netherlands; e-mail: [email protected]

Acknowledgments: The Tiriyó data for this work were collected mostly in Brazil, initially as partof Dr. Spike Gildea’s Northern Brazilian Cariban Languages Documentation Project (NSF grantnumber DBS-9210130), and also in Surinam (with the support of the French IRD, ex-ORSTOM).Further data were collected and analyzed with the support of the Max Planck Institute for Psy-cholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. These organisations are kindly thanked for havingprovided me support during the research that lead to this work. I also thank Denny Moore andDavid Fleck for comments on material used in this paper. Of course, all remaining mistakes aremy own.

8. I cannot resist mentioning the persistence with which an earlier Caribanist, Karl von denSteinen, attempted to find a Bakairi verb for ‘to love’ in the late 19th century (original in Ger-man; translation mine). “The paradigm of the very simple verb ‘to love’, amo, amas, amat,was simply impossible to obtain from Antonio [von den Steinen’s main Bakairi consultant;SM]. Sentence 236 [in von den Steinen’s questionnaire – SM] was, in Portuguese, eu amo estamulher, I love this woman. Yes, but what does amo mean? At first he thought I had meant theBakairi word ama = you. Then, as I struggled to explain it, he complained that people talkso diversely, some say certain things, others say other things; he had already heard that wordin the songs of some of the expedition members [. . . ], but he had never heard it in conversa-tions and thus did not understand what it meant. I was at pains to explain it to him with allconceivable examples, paraphrases, and oppositions, I depicted a mother’s love, love betweenspouses, friendship, I described a female monkey pressing her little baby to her breast and acat defending her kittens, I introduced the feeling of missing one’s relatives when one is faraway from home, and I contrasted the love for the other members of one’s tribe to the hatetowards the Kayabí, the traditional enemies – all in vain, there was only feeling, and Antoniohad no name for it. He finally translated the sentence as yekorúto pekóto; only the gods knowwhat it really means, and only one thing is clear to me: yekorúto is not a verb form, and thuscannot mean ‘I love’.” (von den Steinen 1892: VII).


158 Sérgio Meira

Abbreviations: 1, 2, 3 1st, 2nd, 3rd person, 1+2 1st person dual inclusive, 1+3 1st person exclu-sive, 3P generic 3rd person (‘he/she/it’), A verbal A argument (‘agent’), ABL ablative, AN GLOSS,ANA anaphoric, APPRC appreciative, APPRH apprehensive (‘afraid of’), CIRC circumstance, COGN

cognoscitive (‘known to’), COLL collective (number), COP copula, CTY certainty (‘assertive’), DAT

dative, DBT dubitative (‘doubt’), DESID desiderative (‘want, like’), DETR detransitivizer, DIFF dif-ficultative, DIM diminutive, DIR directional, EMPH emphatic, ESS essive (‘as, in the quality of’),EVID evidential, FIDEL fidelitive, FUT future, GenP genitive phrase, IGNOR ignorative, IMPE im-perative, IN inanimate, INST instrumental, INTN intensifier, IRAS irascitive, NEG negative, NZR

nominalizer, O verbal O argument (‘patient’), ODI odiative, OV O-verb phrase, POSS possessed-form marker, PP postpositional phrase, PRES present, PRDL predilective (‘best’, ‘favorite’), PROT

protective, PRX GLOSS, PST past, QP GLOSS, REFL reflexive, REL relator prefix, S verbal S argu-ment (“intransitive subject”), SATIS satisfactive, SUPER superioritive.

In the glosses, a dot is used when more than one word is necessary to gloss a certain morpheme(e.g., how.much, a.lot), or when two independent categories happen to be (accidentally or not)expressed by the same morpheme (e.g., PRES.CTY; in other contexts, PRES and CTY correspond toindependent morphemes).

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Mental state postpositions in Tiriyó and other Cariban languages

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