Meronymy and holonymy in narrative and procedural texts of the Apurinã language (Aruák)

Abstract

This paper aims investigates the occurrence of meronyms in narrative and procedural texts of the Apurinã language, indigenous language spoken in the southeast of the state of Amazonas - Brazil. Meronymy, according to Cruse (2000), is a semantic phenomenon that expresses the part (meronym)/all (holonym) relation, and there may be different semantic subtypes expressing such a relation (Winston; Chaffin; Hermann 1987). Among such subtypes there are those denoting an event (activity/holonym) and the subevents (features/meronym) associated with it. There was a lack of descriptive linguistic work, especially in the case of indigenous languages, focused on this type of meronymy, involving verbs. This kind of investigation can be useful for future studies about verbs in indigenous languages, in order to identify possible morphosyntactic similarities between verbs designating subevents (meronyms) and their corresponding broader events (holonyms). The texts analyzed were selected from the textual database of the Apurinã language, interlinearized in the Fieldwork Language Explorer (FLEx) program by Facundes and his research team, over three decades of studies. It was concluded that in the texts investigated, there is a greater presence of meronymic activity/feature relations than of any other semantic subtype of meronym. This is because narrative and procedural textual types are intrinsically permeated by events and their unfoldings, either, in the first case, by the narration of events and their associated sub-events, or, in the second case, by the explanation of the sub-events that constitute the realization of a larger event.