Karitiana, otherwise known as Caritiana or Yjxa, is a

Tupian language The Tupi or Tupian language family comprises some 70 languages spoken in South America, of which the best known are Tupi proper and Guarani. Homeland and ''urheimat'' Rodrigues (2007) considers the Proto-Tupian urheimat to be somewhere between ...

spoken in the State of Rondônia, Brazil, by 210 out of 320

Karitiana people The Karitiana or Caritiana are an indigenous people of Brazil, whose reservation is located in the western Amazon. They count 320 members, and the leader of their tribal association is Renato Caritiana. They subsist by farming, fishing and hunt ...

, or 400 according to Cláudio Karitiana, in the Karitiana reserve 95 kilometres south of

Porto Velho Porto Velho (, ''Old Port'') is the capital of the Brazilian state of Rondônia, in the upper Amazon River basin, and a Catholic Metropolitan Archbishopric. The population is 548,952 people (as of the IBGE 2021 estimation). Located on the border ...

. The language belongs to the Arikém language family from the Tupi stock. It is the only surviving language in the family after the other two members, Kabixiâna and Arikém, became extinct.Landin, David J. “An Outline of the Syntactic Structure of Karitiâna Sentences”
MA Thesis. University College London, 1984

History

Although the first Western contacts with the Karitiana people are believed to have begun in the 17th century, the first recorded contact dates to 1907 when a survey conducted by Cândio Rondon indicated that they were already working for

Bolivia , image_flag = Bandera de Bolivia (Estado).svg , flag_alt = Horizontal tricolor (red, yellow, and green from top to bottom) with the coat of arms of Bolivia in the center , flag_alt2 = 7 × 7 square p ...

n rubber tappers. Systematic contact between the Karitiana people and Caucasians, nevertheless began in the 1950s with the intervention of ISA and Roman Catholic Salesian missionaries. As a result of the missionaries' visit, a list of words and phrases were compiled, allowing Professor Aryon Rodrigues, who was working at the

University of Campinas The State University of Campinas ( pt, Universidade Estadual de Campinas), commonly called Unicamp, is a public research university in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Unicamp is consistently ranked among the top universities in Brazil and Latin ...

at the time, to classify the language as a member of the Arikém Family by comparing the language to existing materials on the Arikém language. Many of the Karitiana people are bilingual in Karitiana and

Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...

, and despite the population growth in recent years and the language's high level of transmission, the language is listed as vulnerable by

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...

due to the low number of speakers and the proximity to the city of

. A literacy project in the 1990s resulted in 24 students being made literate, and written documentation of the culture, as well as audio recordings were created. As of 2005, indigenous teachers have been holding lessons in the villages. However, the literacy project ended in 1997 due to a lack of permanent funding.

Literature on Karitiana

Some of the earliest works on the language date to the 1970s by missionary David Landin, who spent time in the Karitiana village between 1972 and 1977, through a partnership between

FUNAI is a Japanese consumer electronics company headquartered in Daitō, Osaka. Apart from producing its own branded electronic products, it is also an OEM providing assembled televisions and video players/recorders to major corporations such as Sh ...

(Fundação Nacional do Índio) and

SIL International SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) is an evangelical Christian non-profit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to ex ...

(Summer Institute of Linguistics) (Landin, 2005). He has mainly studied syntax (1984), but has also compiled lexicon that has resulted in the creation of a Karitiana dictionary (2005). Another early researcher is Gloria Kindell, also from the SIL, who has analyzed phonological and syntactic aspects of Karitiana (1981). The first substantial

grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structure, structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clause (linguistics), clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraint ...

of Karitiana, however, was published by Luciana Storto (1999), describing topics on the

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines * Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts * Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...

and

syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...

, and since then she has published a number of papers on Karitana

(2003, 2008, 2012, 2013, 2014). Subsequently, a number of studies on the language has continued to be published, covering a wide array of topics. Ana Müller, for example has published papers on Karitiana

semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy Philosophy (f ...

(2006, 2009, 2010, 2012). Ivan Rocha da Silva has produced a variety of works on Karitiana syntax (Rocha 2014), including two extensive descriptions on syntactical topics (2011, 2016).

Ethnographically Ethnography (from Greek ''ethnos'' "folk, people, nation" and ''grapho'' "I write") is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject o ...

, Felipe Ferreira Vander Velden has documented a number of social aspects of the Karitiana people, specifically researching about the relations between indigenous peoples and animals. He has published a book about domestic animals among the Kartitiana (2012).

Phonology

Vowels

Karitiana vowels can be distinguished by the

features Feature may refer to: Computing * Feature (CAD), could be a hole, pocket, or notch * Feature (computer vision), could be an edge, corner or blob * Feature (software design) is an intentional distinguishing characteristic of a software item ...

igh ack and ound and can be

short Short may refer to: Places * Short (crater), a lunar impact crater on the near side of the Moon * Short, Mississippi, an unincorporated community * Short, Oklahoma, a census-designated place People * Short (surname) * List of people known as ...

long Long may refer to: Measurement * Long, characteristic of something of great duration * Long, characteristic of something of great length * Longitude (abbreviation: long.), a geographic coordinate * Longa (music), note value in early music mens ...

oral The word oral may refer to: Relating to the mouth * Relating to the mouth, the first portion of the alimentary canal that primarily receives food and liquid **Oral administration of medicines ** Oral examination (also known as an oral exam or oral ...

or nasal.

Consonants

Karitiana also presents �tʃand � but according to Luciana Storto (1999), the occurrence of the

glottal stop The glottal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents thi ...

is predictable, and �tʃis extremely rare, though it occurs in Karitiana's

personal pronouns Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...

. The nasals are prestopped if they are preceded by an oral vowel, and poststopped if they are followed by one. The

velar nasal The voiced velar nasal, also known as agma, from the Greek word for 'fragment', is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is the sound of ''ng'' in English ''sing'' as well as ''n'' before velar consonants as in ''Englis ...

is denasalized to before oral vowels in unstressed syllables, poststopped to before oral vowels in stressed syllables, and prestopped after oral vowels. are

nasalized In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the Internationa ...

when surrounded by nasal vowels.

Morphology

In his PhD thesis, Caleb Everett (2006) listed six

word class In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assi ...

es for Karitiana. In general, Karitiana follows the general trend in Tupi languages of presenting little dependent-marking or nominal morphology, though it has a robust system of

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative langu ...

verbal affixes. Valence-related verbal prefixes occur closer to the verb root than other prefixes, and according to Everett, the most crucial valency distinction in Karitiana is the distinction between semantically monovalent and polyvalent verbs as this plays an important role in verbal inflections and clausal constructions, such as the formation of imperative,

interrogative An interrogative clause is a clause whose form is typically associated with question-like meanings. For instance, the English sentence "Is Hannah sick?" has interrogative syntax which distinguishes it from its declarative counterpart "Hannah is ...

and negative clauses, as well as in the establishment of grammatical relations. Karitiana presents a binary future/non-future tense suffix system and a number of aspect suffixes. It also presents desiderative inflection, an optional evidentiality suffix, a verb-focus system among other constructions. Karitiana presents a nominalizer suffix that is attached to verbs in order to derive nouns. In general, nouns serving as core arguments for a verb are left unmarked for case, but non-core arguments can receive allative and oblique case markers.

Pronouns

Only

epicene Epicenity is the lack of gender distinction, often reducing the emphasis on the masculine to allow the feminine. It includes androgyny – having both masculine and feminine characteristics. The adjective ''gender-neutral'' may describe epicenit ...

pronouns exist in Karitiana. This means that no distinction is made between male vs. female (as "he" or "she" in English). There are free pronouns and pronominal prefixes, the latter of which serves to cross-reference the

absolutive In grammar, the absolutive case (abbreviated ) is the case of nouns in ergative–absolutive languages that would generally be the subjects of intransitive verbs or the objects of transitive verbs in the translational equivalents of nominative– ...

nominal Nominal may refer to: Linguistics and grammar * Nominal (linguistics), one of the parts of speech * Nominal, the adjectival form of "noun", as in "nominal agreement" (= "noun agreement") * Nominal sentence, a sentence without a finite verb * Nou ...

of a given

clause In language, a clause is a constituent that comprises a semantic predicand (expressed or not) and a semantic predicate. A typical clause consists of a subject and a syntactic predicate, the latter typically a verb phrase composed of a verb with ...

, and also functions as possessors when attached to nouns. It is also worth to mention that the third person pronoun ''i'' is the only free pronoun that can be used to express possession. Examples of free pronouns and pronominal prefixes: Karitiana has at least six

demonstrative pronouns Demonstratives (abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic; their meaning depending on a particular frame ...

. 'Ka' refers to manner, 'ho' is proximal, 'onɨ̃' is distal, 'ɲã' refers to things that are close and seated, 'hɨp' refers to things that are close and supine, and 'hoːɾi' refers to things that are out of sight.

Causativization

Karitiana expresses causation by the prefix 'm-' or the periphrastic 'tɨpõŋ' (Rocha, 2014), inferring that one participant is causing another to act in a certain manner. The prefix 'm-' is used to add an argument to

intransitive verbs In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb whose context does not entail a direct object. That lack of transitivity distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Additionally, intransitive verbs are ...

, and 'tɨpõŋ' is used to add a third argument to a

transitive verb A transitive verb is a verb that accepts one or more objects, for example, 'cleaned' in ''Donald cleaned the window''. This contrasts with intransitive verbs, which do not have objects, for example, 'panicked' in ''Donald panicked''. Transitiv ...

, and the former agent receives the

oblique Oblique may refer to: * an alternative name for the character usually called a slash (punctuation) ( / ) * Oblique angle, in geometry *Oblique triangle, in geometry *Oblique lattice, in geometry * Oblique leaf base, a characteristic shape of the b ...

suffix '-tɨ'.

Nominalization

The

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry ...

'-pa' can be attached to

non-finite verb A nonfinite verb is a derivative form of a verb unlike finite verbs. Accordingly, nonfinite verb forms are inflected for neither number nor person, and they cannot perform action as the root of an independent clause. In English, nonfinite verbs inc ...

s, in general, resulting in a noun that is related to the given verb. The meaning of the resulting noun is quite flexible and it varies according to the context. For example: In certain contexts 'taɾɨkipa' can be used to refer to canoe, car, airplane, as well as a friend's house that one frequently visits, or make-up and nice clothing, as these are associated, for some Karitiana, to going out in the city. Verbs associated with '-pa' can also be preceded by a noun in order to reduce the scope of the '-pa' nominal: In some cases, ’-pa' can also be attached to nouns to derive other nouns. For instance, when attached to nouns representing animals, the result is the animal's habitat or a trail used by it.

Syntax

Case and agreement

Karitiana displays an ergative pattern of agreement, where the subject agrees with the intransitive verb, and the object agrees with the transitive verb, as is shown in examples 1a to 1f. This pattern surfaces in all

matrix clause An independent clause (or main clause) is a clause that can stand by itself as a ''simple sentence''. An independent clause contains a subject and a predicate and makes sense by itself. Independent clauses can be joined by using a semicolon or ...

s and is evident from person agreement morphology on verbs, and is true for both declarative and non-declarative sentences. An exception is the object

focus Focus, or its plural form foci may refer to: Arts * Focus or Focus Festival, former name of the Adelaide Fringe arts festival in South Australia Film *''Focus'', a 1962 TV film starring James Whitmore * ''Focus'' (2001 film), a 2001 film based ...

construction, where the transitive verb eccentrically agrees with the ergative argument as shown in examples 2a and 2b. This construction does not involve intransitivization, and the eccentric agreement is a product of object focus morphology. According to Everett (2006), many phenomena in Karitiana follow a nominative pattern generally due to the pragmatic status of arguments. The author argues that the grammatical relations of Karitiana suggest a system where syntactic phenomena often tend to display nominative-accusative patterns, and morphological phenomena tend to display ergative-absolutive patterns.

Semantics

Quantification

Noun phrase In linguistics, a noun phrase, or nominal (phrase), is a phrase that has a noun or pronoun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently oc ...

s (NPs) in Karitiana surface as

bare nouns A bare noun is a noun that is used without a surface determiner or quantifier. In natural languages, the distribution of bare nouns is subject to various language-specific constraints. Under the DP hypothesis a noun in an argument position must ...

, without any functional operator, such as

inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defin ...

to mark number or

definiteness In linguistics, definiteness is a semantic feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between referents or senses that are identifiable in a given context (definite noun phrases) and those which are not (indefinite noun phrases). The prototypical d ...

. Bare nouns can refer to one or more entities, definite or indefinite, and these are determined by the context in which they occur. Karitiana does not require numeral classifiers, thus numerals receive the oblique suffix -t and are directly linked to common nouns. The numeral system consists of units from 1 to 5, and larger numbers are expressed with a combination of these units. Karitiana makes a lexical distinction between

mass Mass is an intrinsic property of a body. It was traditionally believed to be related to the quantity of matter in a physical body, until the discovery of the atom and particle physics. It was found that different atoms and different elementar ...

and

count Count (feminine: countess) is a historical title of nobility in certain European countries, varying in relative status, generally of middling rank in the hierarchy of nobility. Pine, L. G. ''Titles: How the King Became His Majesty''. New York: ...

nouns. Count nouns can be counted directly, while mass nouns require a system of measurement. Quantifying expressions can behave like adverbs or nouns. The word ''si’ĩrimat'' is used to mean nobody or never, and the word ''kandat'' is used to express quantification of nouns and verbs. Universal quantification is conveyed by the expression ''(ta)akatyym'', where ''-ta'' is a third person anaphora, ''aka'' is the verb to be, and ''tyym'' is the SUBordinate particle. This expression roughly means those who are. Anaphoric ''ta'' is used when the quantifying expression is not adjacent to the noun it modifies, and is not necessary when it is adjacent to the noun.