Introduction

This chapter investigates aspects of grammatical relations in five Tuparian languages (Akuntsú, Makuráp, Mekéns (Sakurabiat), Tuparí, and Wayoró), with special focus on Akuntsú, in order to compare and discuss their respective alignment patterns and the relationship between these patterns and word order.

Van Valin and LaPolla (1997) have shown that grammatical relations and/or semantic roles are essential to well-formed clauses, to how speakers create meaning, and how hearers interpret it. Coding of grammatical relations varies across languages, ranging from morphological case marking and word order to the discourse-pragmatic features.

The present work addresses the similarities and unique characteristics of grammatical relations in Tuparian languages. In addition, this chapter presents some of the special characteristics of Akuntsú, where the presence of an inanimate patient of a transitive construction was said to trigger a change in the alignment pattern. This study sheds light on the grammatical organization of Akuntsú, and raises the hypothesis that this language does not differentiate between possessive and intransitive con-structions due to the character of its lexical roots. The lack of case marking in core arguments in the Tuparian languages indicates that grammatical relations are sensitive to verb semantics and verb categories, such as voice, word order, person markers, and animacy.

The rest of this chapter is organized as follows: the remainder of Section 1 outlines the current status of some languages in Rondônia, their historical background, and typological features of Akuntsú; Section 2 offers an overview of grammatical relations in Tuparian languages; Section 3 introduces the relationship between grammatical relations, word order, and animacy hierarchy; Section 4 discusses nominal and verbal syntax in Akuntsú; and Section 5 presents concluding remarks.

Languages of Rondônia

The term Tupian, designating a language family, has been employed since Rodrigues (1955) to refer to a linguistic family which includes the Tupi–Guarani subfamily and other smaller and lesser-known subfamilies. In 1986, Rodrigues revised the internal relationships within the Tupian family, accounting for ten subfamilies: Arikém, Aweti, Juruna, Mawé, Mondé, Mundurukú, Puruborá, Ramarama, Tuparí, and Tupi–Guaraní (Rodrigues 1986). Recent studies on genetic relationship and internal classification of the Tupian family have improved our understanding of this language family (Cabral and Rodrigues 2012; Galucio et al. 2015).