Edited by Simon E. Overall, Rosa Vallejos and Spike Gildea
[Typological Studies in Language 122] 2018
► pp. 85–102
The Paresi people, who number approximately 3000, live in Mato Grosso, Brazil. The following types of predicates are found: nominal, adjectival, locational, existential and possessive predicates. There are three types of strategies used: verbless predicates, the use of the copula tyaona, and the use of prefixes. The source of the copula may be its homonymous form tyaona ‘live, be born, happen’. It has a more restricted use in nominal and adjectival predicates, with the meaning ‘become’ (similar to a semi-copula), and takes aspectual markers. Nominal predicates can be further semantically classified into identity or predicational statements (Stassen 1997). In locative predicates, a copula is used when the the personal proclitics are used instead of full noun phrases. Existential predicates are formed by the existential verb aka. Possessive predicates are formed by prefixes, a strategy which is not common cross-linguistically. They may be derived from inalienable (plant parts and kinship terms) and alienable nouns through the attributive ka-. Its negative counterpart, the prefix ma-, derives private stative predicates from nouns and stative verbs.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 26 june 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.