Estruturas causativas em Tenetehára: uma abordagem minimalista

My aim in this dissertation is to investigate the causative structures in Tenetehára. In descriptive terms, it is shown that this language displays two causative morphemes: {mu-} and {-(u)kar}. The prefix {mu-} main role is to causativize inergative and unaccusative predicates, whereas the suffix {-...

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Bibliographic Details
Author: Quesler Fagundes Camargos
Format: master thesis
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2013
Country:Brasil
Institution:Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)
Repository:Repositório Institucional da UFMG
Language:Portuguese
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.ufmg.br:1843/LETR-9ARQBD
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1843/LETR-9ARQBD
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Estrutura argumental
Programa minimalista
Família Tupí-Guaraní
Língua tenetehária
Causativização
Minimalismo
Língua tenetehára Orações
Língua tenetehara Gramática
Língua tenetehára Sintaxe
Índios da América do Sul Brasil Línguas
Língua tenetehára Verbos
Índios Línguas
Índios Tenetehára
Description
Summary:My aim in this dissertation is to investigate the causative structures in Tenetehára. In descriptive terms, it is shown that this language displays two causative morphemes: {mu-} and {-(u)kar}. The prefix {mu-} main role is to causativize inergative and unaccusative predicates, whereas the suffix {-(u)kar} causativizes transitive verbs. Following Pylkkänens (2002, 2008) proposal, I hypothesize that Voiceo and voCAUSE are separate pieces in the Tenetehára inventory of functional heads. I also demonstrate that they cannot be grouped together into a unique morpheme in the lexicon. This hypothesis is based on the fact that these heads are morphologically realized in Tenetehára. Thus, when a causative transitive receives the reflexive morpheme {ze-}, this is an indication that the Voiceo is overtly realized. I also propose that the causative head is realized by the morpheme {mu-}. In line with this reasoning, my proposal is that both Voiceo and voCAUSE are separate heads in the verbal argument structure. Moreover, the voCAUSE head could be introduced without the projection of VoiceP. This proposal is based on the fact that there occurs a situation in which the causative construction does not introduce an agent/external argument. This occurs in particular when there is an applied argument introduced by an applicative head above vPCAUSE. This proposal is corroborated by the realization of a high applicative head, which is morphologically instantiated by the morpheme {eru-} above voCAUSE. Based upon Pylkkänens (2002, 2008) morphosyntactic diagnostics, I show that the causative {mu-} only selects root. This proposal is evidenced by the following diagnostics: the impossibility of verbal morphology between the root and the causative head; (ii) the fact that manner-adverbs cannot scope over the root. As to the morpheme {-(u)kar}, the proposal is that it only selects a phasic vP. This hypothesis is reinforced by the following diagnostics: (i) there is no restriction of verbal morphology between the root and the causative verb (including high applicative morphology), (ii) the causative allows lower scope for agentive adverbial modification inside voCAUSE head.