Transitivity in Pano and Takana languages: typological aspects between two linguistic families in South America

Abstract

This research project aims to analyze the prototypical transitivity in a group of languages of the Pano and Takana linguistic families - languages spoken in Brazilian, Peruvian and Bolivian Western Amazon. This is a comparative study about the morphosyntactic alignment and agreement systems on Kashibo-Kakataibo, Kaxinawa, Matis, Matsés, Shanenawa and Shipibo-Konibo (Pano) and Araona, Cavineña, Ese Eija and Takana (Takana). These languages have similar grammatical properties still not much studied in respect to their prototypical aspects and their historical relationship. Based on grammatical analysis, the objective of this research is to investigate, from the theoretical-methodological perspective of the typological-functional linguistics, the semantic properties on the ergativity and intra/interclausal systems related to prototypical transitivity features encoded in core noun phrases of these two morphosyntactic systems. Furthermore, in addition to investigating the semantic affinities on these systems, we will relate such properties to studies of linguistic classification, geographical and historical research on these languages/families already published, and then we propose to characterize the degree and the type of affinity on these systems of these languages. We use scientific researches already published by scholars of these languages, available in theses and other types of publication. Fundamentally, we aim to provide insight into new theoretical and applied research about the transitivity on these systems in the group of the Pano and Takana languages studied.