Mojeño Trinitario, an Arawak language spoken in Bolivia, makes frequent use of clauses without a verb or a copula. These encode some of the most common semantic types of nonverbal predication – equation, inclusion, attribution (as understood by Payne 1997), but also typologically neglected types, like quantification and temporality. Possession, existence, and two unattested semantic types – motion-presentational and quantified existential, are actually encoded in Mojeño Trinitario with verbal clauses and copular clauses. The non-copular nonverbal constructions present a very regular morphosyntactic pattern, even though they make use of predicates that belong to different classes (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, numerals, demonstratives and prepositional phrases). These constructions can be subsumed under a major clause type distinct from the verbal clause type, and are characterized by a nonverbal predicate either juxtaposed to its argument, or standing by itself if it is suffixed with a person index. Nonverbal clauses share some properties with verbal clauses, like some of the inflectional morphology (e.g. negation, plural, TAM), but they however neatly differ in three respects – constituent order, argument indexing, and irrealis marking. In conclusion, Mojeño Trinitario shows a nonverbal clause type clearly distinct from the verbal clause type, and this draws a robust major distinction among lexical classes between on the one hand, verbs, and on the other hand, non-verbs (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and numerals).
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Fabre, Alain
2020. A predicación nominal posesiva en la expresión de las relaciones interpersonales en las lenguas de la familia mataguayo (Gran Chaco), con énfasis especial en el nivaĉle y el maká. LIAMES: Línguas Indígenas Americanas 20 ► pp. e020014 ff.
2019. Similar but different: the functions of the Mojeño Trinitario root expressing similarity. Faits de Langues 50:1 ► pp. 227 ff.
Rose, Françoise
2023. Questioning the relevance of alienability in Arawak linguistics: an innovative analysis of possession in Mojeño Trinitario. Linguistics 61:6 ► pp. 1491 ff.
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