Morphosyntactic alteration of predicates in Guajá triggered by the fronting of adverbial expressions

Abstract

This paper proposes to describe and analyze, in the Guajá language (Tupí-Guaraní family), the phenomenon that occurs at the head of a predicate when the adverbial expression shifts from the end of the sentence to the first position. This change in position causes a morphosyntactic structural change: a suffix appears at the head of the predicate, and the person prefixes are now expressed by a paradigm typical of less finite sentences, leading us to interpret the process as a type of subordination. From a pragmatic point of view, when brought to a prominent position, the adverbial expression gains greater informational weight in the sentence, with the effect that the predicate, which previously contained the main information, now represents secondary information. In addition to discussing this phenomenon in Guajá, we compare its occurrence with the way it appears in other languages of the family in order to emphasize the peculiarities taken on in this specific language.

Keywords
Tupí-Guaraní family; Guajá; Predicates; Adverbial expressions; Omnipredicativity