Stative verbs vs. nouns in Sateré-Mawé and the Tupian family

Abstract

"Mawé (or Sateré-Mawé) is a Tupian language with approximately 5,000 speakers living mostly along the Marau and Andirá rivers in the states of Amazonas and Pará, in Brazil. Several studies have already sketched analyses of aspects of Mawé morphosyntax: Graham et al. (1984), Rodrigues & Dietrich (1997, based on data from Graham et al. 1984), and, more recently, Franceschini (1999, 2002). The present study concentrates on the topic of the so-called stative verbs and their morphosyntactic properties. This topic has been discussed in the literature, though not in much detail. Graham et al. (1984: 188) mention “verbos descritivos” (‘descriptive verbs’), and Franceschini discusses “verbes d’état” (1999: 96-106) or “verbos de estado” (2002), i.e., ‘state verbs’. Rodrigues & Dietrich, on the other hand, implicitly analyze the words in question as nouns (1997: 293, passim). The main goal of the present study is to discuss the properties of these “stative words” (a more neutral term) and compare their analyses as verbs and as nouns. A second goal is to compare the situation in Mawé to what has already been described for a number of other languages in the Tupí-Guaraní sub-branch of the Tupian family, in which a similar set of stative words have also been variously analyzed as verbs and as nouns"