Interface morfologia e sintaxe em Tenetehára

Abstract

This dissertation aims at making an interface amongst morphology and syntax in the Tenetehara language. We analyze morphemes which increase and decrease verbal valence, morphemes of absolutive and of nominative Case, of time/aspect/mood and of negation. Starting with the occurrence of verbal affixes, it was proposed a linear arrangement in which these affixes occur in the verbal paradigm. We still examined the morphosyntactic behavior of certain verbs which present incorporated objects in order to provide additional evidence to the hypothesis of unergativity, according to which tw.ergatives are implicit transitives, in agreement with Hale e Keyser hypothesis (1993). The study of the causative prefix {-mu} also reveals that such prefix constitutes an expedient of increasing the valence of verbs with only one argument. The reflexive prefix {-ze} has the function of decreasing the verbal valence and of indicating the middle voice. We also show that the suffix f¬harl derives nouns from verbs of action in a similar way to the suffix {-(d)or} of Portuguese. Therefore, the co-occurrence of the suffix {-hail with unacusative verbs will result in an ungrammatical sentence. Such bad formation is directly related with the fact that unacusative verbs does not select a D/NP agent, once that they are defectives verbs for not projecting the Spec-vP position. Additionally, having in mind the scope of occurrence of the suffix {-hat.}, we propose to question the strong lexicalist hypothesis which was originally proposed by Chomsky (1970, 1995), according to which all the process of word formation happens in the lexical level. Our analysis has revealed that the suffix {-liar} can generate nouns from complex constituents and not only from simple stems.