Abstract
In this paper I present the types of nominalization in Kakua, a language spoken by a group of hunter-gatherer peoples from the small Kakua-Nukakan family, inhabitants of the Vaupés area in eastern Colombia. I argue that the nominalization strategies in Kakua have developed from a traceable typical Kakua-Nukakan strategy, into a more Vaupés-like profile of expressing nominalizations, where Kakua had added more nominalization strategies in order for the language to adapt to the types of nominalizations found in many of Kakua’s neighboring languages in the Vaupés area. For this, I will first give a description of the nominalization strategies in Kakua, to later compare them to the nominalization strategies in Nukak, Kakua’s sister language spoken outside of the Vaupés area. The paper concludes with a comparison of nominalization in Kakua and the nominalization strategies found in the surrounding languages.
Acknowledgments
I gratefully acknowledge support for fieldwork on Kakua from from MPI EvA (Leipzig) and LLILAS (UT Austin) from funds granted by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Bolaños; Epps). I am enormously grateful to the speakers of Kakua who worked with me and welcomed me into their villages. A version of this paper was presented at the Global Workshop of Nominalizations in the Americas, at the Language and Culture Research Center at James Cook University, in Cairns, in 2014; I thank that audience for their comments. Finally, I thank reviewers and editors of this volume for their helpful comments on this paper.
Abbreviations
- 1, 2, 3
first, second, third person
- abstr
abstract
- act.s
stative actant (Mahecha’s examples)
- an/anim
animate
- a.nmlz
agent nominalization
- adjvz
adjectivizer
- ass
assertion
- cl
classifier
- col
collaborative
- decl
declarative
- emphz
emphatic
- evid
evidential
- exist
existential
- f
feminine
- freq
frequentative (Mahecha’s examples)
- fut
future
- hab
habitual
- in/inan
inanimate
- inf
inferred
- intens
intensifier
- loc
locative
- m
masculine
- nmlz
nominalizer
- obj
object
- part
partitive
- pl
plural
- poss
possessive
- pst
past
- real
realis
- rel
relativizer
- rem.pst
remote past
- sg
singular
- sgnf
singular non-feminine
- Sp.
Spanish word
- ss
same subject
- voc
vocative
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