draft manuscript - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

Table 2.11: Modern Omagua Nouns and Verbs Nominalized with -waRa
Root Gloss Stem Gloss
kaisuma manioc beer kaisumawaRa manioc beer jug
kapi grass sp. kapiwaRa capybara
kumIsa say, speak kumIsawaRa chatterbox (Sp. charlatán)
kuu swidden kuuwaRa farmer
manipiaRa fishhook manipiaRawaRa fisherman
Ritama village RitamawaRa village inhabitant (Sp. poblador)
sas1wa ant sas1wawaRa anteater
tiama flute tiamawaRa flute player (Sp. pifanero)
yumuita teach yumuitawaRa teacher
to fill the functional ground lost by -suRi, namely nominalizing subjects with “neutral” semantics
(see the pair kumIsawaRa ‘chatterbox’ versus kumIsasuRi ‘gossip’). This is in stark contrast to the
distribution of -waRa in Kokama-Kokamilla. Vallejos Yopán (2010a:230-231) argues that -waRa appears
predominantly on transitive verbs, with only two attestations on nouns located in her corpus.
However, we consider the endocentric function reconstructable to Proto-Omagua-Kokama given the
syntactic distribution of cognates across the Tupí-Guaraní family.
2.2.3.2.5 Container Nominalizer =SiRu A passage from Manuel Uriarte’s diaries exhibits
one attestation of what we have described for modern Omagua as a container nominalizer =SiRu, as
shown in (2.30).
(2.30) kaRayoa, maRiaSiRukate!
kaRayoa maRia =SiRu =kate
Portuguese Mary =cont.nomz =all
‘Portuguese, to the church!’ 62
(example (8.1))
This morpheme, which is historically related to the Proto-Omagua-Kokama word for ‘container’,
63 and as such stems derived with =SiRu can roughly be characterized as denoting persons
or places which “contain” the state or event denoted by the root (Table 2.12). Synchronically, the
root SiRu means ‘shirt, clothes’.
A more transparent interpretation of ‘container’ is still visible when =SiRu functions endocentrically
(Table 2.13), although we should note that these forms appear to be lexicalized and in some
cases yield idiosyncratic meanings (e.g., kai ‘white monkey sp.’ but kaiSiRu ‘mischievous boy’). 64
62 In modern Omagua ‘church’ is most often realized as [maR"SiRu] or [­maRi"SiRu], and speakers are not aware of a
relation to Maria. However, this form is attested (as ) in von Humboldt’s early 19th century sketch
of Omagua (von Humboldt 2011:430), and as such must date to at least the 18th century.
63 For cognates, see (among other languages) Sirionó iRu ‘basket’ (Priest and Priest 1985); Tapirapé and Parakanã 1Ro
‘basket’ (Praça 2007; da Silva 2003).
64 One could analyze the forms in Table 2.13 as NP-NP compounds, but given that =SiRu has also extended to derive
nouns from verbs, we opt for a nominalization analysis here.
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