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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2016
In this paper I will deal with a type of nominalization which appears in Desano. Emphasis will be placed on arguments justifying a given underlying structure of a class of nominalizations rather than on the types of rules needed to convert the underlying structure into the realized nominalization.
A class of nominalizations will be presented here. I will give evidence to show that these forms are to be derived from relative clauses. Consider the following forms:
1 Desano is spoken by a group of about 2,000 people who live along the Papurí, Vaupés and Tiquié rivers in Colombia and Brazil. Desano is classified as an Eastern Tucanoan language.
Work on this language was supported by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, one from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and a Columbia University President’s Fellowship.
I also wish to thank David Perlmutter and John J. Chew for looking over earlier drafts of this paper and for their valuable comments.
2 The transcription used throughout this paper is fairly straightforward. The following symbols need further explanation: y is a high central unrounded vowel; j is a palatal glide; N indicates that the preceding morpheme is nasal. (Nasality is a feature of the morphene in Desano. Morphemes are entirely nasal or entirely oral.)
A sequence of two identical vowels indicates a glottalized syllable, i.e., vv = [v?v].
3 Verb stems are combinations of verb roots plus various other morphemes such as modals, directionals, etc. Examples of verb stems
Verb stems can appear in nominalizations of this type, e.g.,
boobeN + dygaN + di + dyN ‘Monday’, (see [(1a)] above).
4 by is the non-3rd person personal ending.
5 de is the oblique case ending.
6 ke is an imperative marker.
7 py is a sentence connecter indicating change of (grammatical) subject.
8 widi- ‘to go out’ and widi- ‘to cut’ are homonyms which are unrelated.
9 For a discussion of this problem see Bach, E., “Nouns and Noun Phrases,” Universals in Linguistic Theory, ed. Bach, E. and Harms, R. T. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968).Google Scholar
10 The base rule which generates structures containing (22) is
Note that this is a recursive rule. Example (37) below provides a case where the recursive properties of this base rule have been applied. Naturally NP’s are not uniquely rewritten as NP S. This is but one of several possibilities for the expansion of NP’s. The other possibilities have no direct bearing on the problem under discussion and will not be considered in this paper.
11 -bo N is the feminine, singular personal ending.
