• spoken in Northwestern Ecuador
• Barbacoan languages have sometimes been classified as Chibchan, but this is unsupported by the available data. Cha’palaa and other Barbacoan languages used to cover most of the northern Ecuadorian and southern Colombian highlands; today there are four living languages on the periphery of this area, and Quechua has become the majority indigenous language of the Ecuadorian highlands. Cha’palaa speakers migrated to the coast from the highlands and historically have had significant contact with Quechua, with some linguistic influence.
Typological Information
• Like many South American languages, Cha'palaa features highly agglutinative morphology and a fairly rigid SOV word order.
• Cha’palaa has a complex predicate system; most predicates are complex, featuring a closed set of generic verbs to the right with most of the verbal morphology, and one or more of an open class of co-verbs to the left.
• The verb phrase is not marked for tense or person, but is marked for number, aspect and several mirative/epistemic/evidential values.
• Noun phrases are less complex than verb phrases, but feature different case markers (accusative, genitive, several locatives, etc.) and a shape-based classifier system.
• Cha’palaa has a medium consonant inventory and four vowels (a, e, i, u – can also occur as long vowels); syllables are generally CV, with limited V and CVC. The language features complex processes of phonological reduction.
Reduplication Form-Function
• Predicate reduplication, for iterative/durative aspect:
Full reduplication of 1, 2, and 3 syllable roots or complex forms, followed by a verb classifier with verb morphology. Stated in a simplified form using the most common CV syllable shapes:
[(CV)(CV)CV]r [(CV)(CV)CV]r VERB.CL
• Nominal reduplication, for several different functions (including adverbial phrase formation): Usually full reduplication. An adverbial adjunct common construction optionally takes the clitic -tene "only/among"). Using simplified CV roots:
[(CV)CV]r [(CV)CV]r (-tene)
• Final-syllable reduplication in property word derivation. Complex forms derive property words through partial reduplication. Again with simplified CV roots:
(CV)(CV)CV.CVr.CVr
(There are several other types of reduplication. One type is full reduplication of ideophones, similar to predicate reduplication but with less restricted morphosyntax: [(CV)(CV)CV]r [(CV)(CV)CV]r)
Relationship Form-Function
various forms - various functions
Reduplication System
• Cha'palaa features several types of reduplication that associate with different construction types and word classes. Full reduplication of roots is common, and partial reduplication also occurs. Three common types of reduplication are: (1) Elements of Cha’palaa’s complex predicate system reduplicate for a durative/iterative meaning. (2) Nominal forms can reduplicate to form different noun phrase constructions such as adverbial adjuncts to certain verbs. (3) Reduplication of final syllables derive a special class of property words including color terms. In addition, there are a number of other reduplication types that apply to numerals, ideophones, and other word classes and construction types.
• Regarding the complex predicate system: The reduplicated parts of the predicate do not carry any verbal morphology, so an explicit verb classifier must occur to the right to carry the inflection. In other words, reduplication of the co-verb triggers an explicit verb classifier.
Comments
There are many kinds of reduplication in Cha'palaa. I will list several, but it is not an exhaustive list. While V, VC, CVC, VV and CVV syllables all take part in reduplication, CV syllables are the most common, so I use them for illustration. (Floyd 2009)
Terminology