Tuparí is an indigenous language of Brazil. It is one of six Tupari languages of the Tupian language family. The Tuparí language, and its people, is located predominantly within the state of Rondônia, though speakers are also present in the state of Acre on the Terra Indıgena Rio Branco. There are roughly 350 speakers of this language, with the total number of members of this ethnic group being around 600.
History Rondônia, like many others, was once strictly belonging to indigenous people of Brazil. The large-scale colonization of Rondônia happened only in the second half of the 20th century. At this time many people died from the introduction of preventable diseases to which they were not immune, and as a result, in the 1950s the Tuparí people were nearly wiped out entirely by measles. According to Caspar (1956), there were only 67 survivors of these epidemics, who were then forced to work for slave wages. The group eventually recovered and increased in their numbers. Now population growth is no longer an issue due to their large family sizes. However, their language is only spoken by approximately 350 people on the two main reserves (Rio Branco and Rio Guaporé). The cultural and linguistic situation varies by village, with some partaking in trans-generational linguistic transmission and others adopting Portuguese.
Current status Regarding the vitality of the language, the number of speakers indicate that this language is critically endangered, at moribund levels, rating an (8A) on the Ethnologue scale. This has to do with many factors, including the fact that in some communities, for example those living on the Terra Indígena Rio Guaporé, intergenerational transmission has ceased entirely due to a complete shift to Portuguese.
Documentation
Existing literature Tuparí is documented in the literature to some extent, with most publications being in Portuguese and English. It has also been discussed in German.
Major contributions to the literature include that of Franz Caspar, mentioned above, who wrote extensively from an ethnographic point of view in the mid 20th century. Several linguists have also produced materials on the Tuparí language. Poliana Alves has written on the phonology of the language (Alves, 1991) and has produced a bilingual dictionary (Alves, 2004). Aryon Dall'Igna Rodrigues collaborated with Franz Caspar to publish a sketch of the grammar (Rodrigues and Caspar, 2017). Lucy Seki, in 2001, wrote about the morphosyntax of nouns in Tuparí (Seki, 2001). In 2018, Adam Roth Singerman produced an extensive description and analysis of Tuparí for his PhD dissertation at the University of Chicago, focusing on the morphosyntax of the language (Singerman, 2018). As well, Singerman also worked to create a literacy workbook, Wan Tupari Ema’en Nika! (Tupari et al., 2016)Tupari, Geovane Kamarom, Isaias Tarim˜a Tupari, Raul Pat’awre Tupari, and Adam Roth Singerman, eds. 2016. Wan Tupari Ema’en NIka!: Nova cartilha de leitura e alfabetizac¸ ˜ao na l´ıngua Tupari [Let’s go write in Tupari!: A new reading and literacy workbook in the Tupari language]. Literacy workbook financed by the Endangered Language Fund. to help boost vitality. His work adds information about the syntax and expression of evidentiality in Tuparí as hadn't been covered in previous research. In regards to non-linguistic references, there are Tuparí stories, written in Portuguese, as part of anthropologist Betty Mindlin's collection of indigenous myths (Mindlin, 1993).
Other major contributions to the literature on Tuparí include Monserrat (2000),Monserrat, Ruth Fonini. 2000. Vocabulário Amondawa-Português, Vocabulário e frases em Arara e Português, Vocabulário Gavião-Português, Vocabulário e frases em Karipuna e Português, Vocabulário e frases em Makurap e Português, Vocabulário e frases em Suruí e Português, Pequeno dicionário em Tupari e Português. Caixas do Sul: Universidade do Caixas do Sul. 91pp. Galucio (1993,Moore, Denny and A.V. Galúcio. 1993. Reconstruction of Proto-Tuparí consonants and vowels. In M. Langdon and L. Hinton (eds.), Survey of Californian and other Indian languages, 119-137. Columbus: Berkeley: Department of Linguistics, University of California. 2011Vilacy Galucio, Ana and Fernanda Nogueira, Antonia. 2011. Results of recent comparative work on the Tupari branch of Tupi. Paper presented at the CILLA V, 6 October 2011. 16pp.), and Moore (1994).Denny Moore and Galucio, Ana Vilacy. 1994. Reconstruction of Proto-Tupari consonants and vowels. In Proceedings of the meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas and the Hokan-Penutian workshop, 119-137. Berkeley: University of California.
Caspar and Singerman Linguistically, the description of Tuparí was lacking prior to the publication of Singerman's dissertation in 2018, especially compared to others within its linguistic family and region. However, Tuparí was one of the first languages and cultures of Rondônia studied in detail. This research was due to the Swiss ethnographer and explorer, Franz Caspar, who took many field-notes in the 1940s and the 1950s, as he lived within the community. He is known in Tuparí as (the long-nosed grandfather). Caspar's notes were passed on to Aryon Dall’Igna Rodrigues, a Brazilian linguist who wrote his dissertation in German on Tupinambá at the University of Hamburg. He wrote an eighty-paged description on Tuparí based on Caspar's notes, however it was never published. It is believed to be because, while he had come up with a description of the language, he had never done any fieldwork in the community himself. This was enough for him to deem that Caspar, being an anthropologist, could potentially have some linguistic errors within his field-notes and documentations. Even though the description of the Tuparí language prior to that done by Singerman was fairly limited, the cultural documentation was among the best in the region. With that being said, the Tuparí people are also currently experiencing a loss of that culture through a language shift, due to the overwhelming modern pressure for them to switch to Portuguese.
Phonology
Consonants +Consonants Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal Nasal Plosive/Affricate Fricative Liquid Glide
Vowels +Oral vowelsFrontCentralRoundHighMidLow
Morphology Tuparí has a complex morphology and morpho-syntactic system, including a nominal domain with morphologically marked aspects, as well as verbal morphology. It also has evidentiality marking in past tense clauses, discussed below. In addition to strong pronouns, weak nominative enclitics and proclitic pronouns, the nominal domain is morphologically marked for possession and case. NPs are also able to undergo internal modification, and number marking can be seen on pronominals. Numerically bare NPs have interpretive flexibility and can be read as plural despite a lack of plural morphology. In verbal morphology, verbalizing is evident in this language, and follows strict ordering restrictions. Affixes can attach to the left or right side of a lexical morpheme, although this does not happen arbitrarily. Other main aspects of verbal morphology in Tuparí are deverbalizing morphology, which turn verbs into other categories such as nouns, valency-manipulating prefixes, discussed below, reduplication of verbal roots, adverbial prefixes and noun incorporation to modify timing and manner, and suffixal morphology with a hierarchy of positions.
+ strong pronouns Root Root + nuclear case Root + oblique case 1st person singular exclusive inclusive 2nd person singular plural
Examples of speakers using strong pronouns:
+ weak enclitics singular dual plural 1st person exclusive inclusive 2nd person 3rd person
Examples of weak nominative enclitics:
+ proclitic pronouns singular plural 1st person exclusive inclusive 2nd person 3rd person coreferential
+ proclitic paradigm with the word singular plural 1st person exclusive inclusive 2nd person 3rd person coreferential
Valency manipulation Valency manipulation refers to the grammar's ability to manipulate how many and what kind of arguments a verb can take. The Tuparí language uses four prefixes for this, causative , comitative-causative , intransitivizing , and reciprocal . The causative morpheme makes the subject of an intransitive verb the object of a transitive verb. The distribution is limited to mostly unaccusatives and verbs of the semantic classes of verbs of motion, nonvolitional states or changes in state, and some verbs of thought or emotion. There are a few transitives that can take this morpheme. The comitative-causative morpheme promotes an intransitive subject to a transitive subject by introducing a new direct object. This morpheme requires that both the subject and the object are undergoing the acting together (i.e. coming). Singerman reports that his consultant approved the morpheme on a wide range of verbs of motion. It may also attach to some auxiliaries to express temporary possession. The intransitivizing morpheme is attested on a few intransitive verbs derived from unmarked transitive base. Common examples are the verb 'command' transforming to 'speak', 'kill' transforming to 'die'. Intransitives derived with may also interact with other valency changing morphemes, such as causativization. Lastly is the reciprocal . This morpheme can only occur on transitive roots. It requires plural subjects to be acting upon each other, i.e. fighting each other. Another notable feature is that the reciprocal can combine with other valency morphemes indicating that it probably occupies a position further left. This is further evidenced by the fact that it does not always fall under the domain of reduplication.
Evidentiality Grammaticalized evidentiality (marking of the source of information) is functional, rather than lexical, and thus is morphologically expressed in a grammatical manner, rather than as an adverbial. Additionally, it has semantic characteristics. It is typically marked in Tupí languages by free particles rather than by bound morphemes, however in Tuparí, evidentiality is marked by a bound verbal suffix. This suffix agrees in number with the subject of the verb, and is required on a clausal level. In Tuparí, only past tense contexts mark a difference in witnessed and unwitnessed utterances, and evidentiality must be marked in these contexts. The sole purpose of the -pnẽ/ -psira morphemes is to mark this difference of witnessing. Evidential markers in Tuparí can easily be considered separately from epistemic markers since their strict syntactic positioning and clausal organization mean that they can only mark sources of evidence, and not other elements such as speaker attitude. They also must be marked in every clause, for example:
There are six allomorphs of the evidential suffix in Tuparí, as seen in the table below: After Oral Vowel After Nasal Vowel After Consonant singular plural
The evidential marker in Tuparí always attaches to the highest verbal head. For example:
In this case, since there is no auxiliary present, it attaches to the lexical verb 'arrive'.
Due to always agreeing with sentential subjects, only works with singular subjects and only with plural ones.
Example: (345) Evidential marking on the lexical verb ‘come’:
The variations depend on whether the lexical verb distinguishes between singular, plural and paucal (two), or just between singular and plural.
Syntax
Cases Tuparí has four cases, as seen in the table below. Note that Nuclear and Locative cases can be stacked.
+Grammatical case Form of Case SuffixCase Suffix in Nasal ContextsGloss NUC (nuclear) LOC (locative) INS (instrumental-lative) OBL (oblique) NUC+LOC (nuclear + locative)