Morphosyntactic alignment in Matis (Pano)

Abstract

This article describes the morphosyntactic alignment in Matis, a language of the Panoan family, spoken in the Javari Valley indigenous territory, western region of the state of Amazonas, Brazil. Studies about the Matis language have been published since the beginning of the 21st century, with analysis of the morphosyntactic alignment restricted to morphological aspects of the clause. Based on the results of these studies and on the description of primary data, this paper proposes the systematized description of the morphosyntactic alignment through the functional and textual analysis of case-marking aspects. The analysis is based on the principles of Typological Functional Linguistics, through the description of data obtained in elicitation sessions and extracted from narratives collected in fieldwork. The results of the morphological analysis indicate the relation of noun categories between morphosyntactic alignment and the ergativity in the case syncretism. In the syntactic analysis, the functional system of the morphosyntactic alignment is the main condition for the interaction between the syntactic ergativity and the participant agreement. It is hoped that the results and conclusions presented in this paper contribute to the understanding on the Matis transitivity systems, as participant agreement and morphosyntactic alignment.