Yanomama clause structure
Helder Perri Ferreira
This thesis fills an significant gap in the description of the Yanomami language family by offering the first in-depth description of the morphology and the syntactic structure of a variety of the Yanomam language, the language of the Yanomami family with the highest number of speakers in Brazil (~12.000). This work intends to be the first of two volumes of a comprehensive grammatical description of the Yanomam variety spoken in the Papiu region by about 400 people and locally know as Yanomama (YMA). The description is largely based on natural examples gathered in the context of the Project for the Documentation of the Yanomama of Papiu, which has produced an extensive archive of almost 60 hours of audio and video recordings, 39 hours of which were at least transcribed and 25 also translated. This thesis provides a full account of several grammatical topics of the YMA, such as the verb and noun morphologies, argument marking devices, valence and voice changing mechanisms, secondary predication, serial verb and complementation constructions, evidentiality marking, among other topics. While this book deals with aspects of the YMA’s simple sentences, a planned second volume will focus on aspects of multi-clausal constructions in YMA, such as coordination, subordination, clause-chaining and other discursive resources of the language.
