Phonology and morphosyntax of the Mehináku Arawakan

This dissertation presents a description of the phonology and morphosyntax of the Mehináku language. Mehináku is a language that belongs to the Arawak family and is classified, according to Aikhenvald's (1999) proposal, in the Paresi-Xingu branch, Xingu subgroup. This language is spoken by approximately 325 people who live on the banks of the Kurisevo River, in the Xingu Indigenous Territory (Mato Grosso, Brazil). This is a descriptive study, based on the analysis of data (from speech samples) collected mainly with speakers who live in the village Utawana, the second largest among the Mehinaku villages. The dissertation is organized into four parts and includes 11 chapters. The first part contains: chapter 1, in which I introduce the Mehinaku people, the cultural context in which they live, their sociolinguistic profile, the genetic affiliation of the Mehinaku language, previous studies on that language and the research methodology; and chapter 2, in which I detail the phonology of the language. The second part, dedicated to the morphological analysis of word classes, is subdivided into closed and open classes. In chapters 3-6, I present the closed classes: in chapter 3, pronouns and postpositions; in chapter 4, numerals and quantifiers; in chapter 5, adjectives and adverbs; in chapter 6, clitics, particles, interjections and ideophones. Chapters 7 and 8 are dedicated to open classes: in chapter 7, the nouns; in chapter 8, the verbs. The third part is dedicated to syntactic analysis, and includes two chapters: in chapter 9, I describe simple sentences and negation in Mehinaku; in chapter 10, I describe complex sentences. Finally, the fourth part contains chapter 11, in which I present an overview of the thesis followed by the conclusion (AU)