Symptomic and morphophonological structure ownership in Aweti language

Abstract

This paper investigates morphophonological alternation phenomena in the realization of prefixal possessive morphemes of Aweti, a Tupian language spoken in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil. At first, a description of the possessive pronominal system is presented, from which, as results, a proposal for the syntactic structure of the possessive DP and a proposal of morphophonological analysis for prefixal allomorphy and its phonological and semantic / extra-linguistic conditionings based on the generative theoretical model of Distributed Morphology is given. The syntactic investigation on the DP brings a discussion on the possession types presented in the language, alienable and inalienable, and the best proposals of representation from the general literature on the subject. The article proposes that the two types of possession in Aweti, alienable and inalienable, are represented by two types of syntactic structures. The morphophonological investigation suggests a decrease in the amount of allomorphs usually proposed for the possessive prefixes and the insertion of phonological readjustment rules. In addition, it is suggested that the information about the gender of the speaker is grammatically encoded in the language, given its relevance to vocabulary insertion.