Séminaire

An Van linden: Bound nouns in Harakmbut

On The January 19, 2021

10:00h to 12:00h

As part of the "Ateliers de Morphosyntaxe" of the Laboratoire DDL - Université Lyon 2: "Alienability contrasts in grammar and lexicon", led vby An Van linden

"Bound nouns in Harakmbut"

This paper focuses on the morphological distinction between potentially free and obligatorily bound nouns in Harakmbut, an endangered isolate language spoken in the Peruvian Amazon. Bound nouns require a noun prefix to obtain independent nominal status (wa- or e-) and refer to inalienably possessed entities, such as body parts, plant parts, and landscape parts, as well as kinship terms and basic shapes or qualities of entities. The same prefixes, wa- and e-, are also used in verb-based nominalization. The morphosyntactic behaviour of bound nouns is different from that of independent nouns in the areas of noun incorporation, N-N compounds and adnominal modification. However, obligatorily bound kinship terms seem to form exceptions, as they typically pattern similarly to independent nouns in these environments. Special attention will be devoted to adnominal possession, in which the presence versus omission of the noun prefix on the possessee noun makes for subtle semantic differences.

This workshop organized by Françoise Rose and Minella Duzerol as part of the seminar "Description, Typologie, Terrain", aims to create a space for presentation and discussion in the field of morphosyntax, from a typological and functional perspective. More here...

An Van linden is associate professor of English language and linguistics at the University of Liège and affiliated researcher in the research unit Functional and Cognitive Linguistics at the University of Leuven; she is a 2020-2021 fellow of the Collegium de Lyon.