• spoken in northwest Brazil and eastern Colombia
• approx. 1500 speakers
• contact with Tucano
Typological Information
• prosodic tone and morpheme-level nasalization
• verb-final basic constituent order • nominative-accusative alignment
• extensive verb compounding, and zero-anaphora, by which subjects, objects, and other clausal constituents are frequently dropped
Reduplication Form-Function
• nouns: unproductive, frozen forms
• verbs: productive, for the most part encodes iterativity
• additional (more unusual) use of reduplication is on attributive adjectives or nouns in lexically frozen nominal compounds
Relationship Form-Function
one form - various functions
Reduplication System
usually copies the first consonant and vowel of the root, which precedes the root
Productivity
only reduplication on verbs is productive
Repetitive Operations
repetitive constructions are common
Recursive Operations
recursive constructions exist but are more limited
Terminology