Anticausativas em Tenetehára-Guajajára: uma análise formal

Abstract

This dissertation aims to investigate the syntactic behavior in anticausatives that appear in the causative alternation pair in Tenetehára-Guajajára, which is a language belonging to the Tupí-Guaraní family. We identified that this language presents unmarked anticausative sentences in its morphology, as well as anticausatives marked through the prefix {ze-}, which indicates anticausative voice. This morpheme can also indicate reflexive sentences, in which it acts as a reflexivizer. In this scope, we propose that anticausatives in Tenetehára-Guajajára present two basic syntactic structures, as follows: i) one formed from vP projection and a VoiceP expletive projection to represent anticausatives marked by {ze-}, and ii) one formed only by a vP projection to represent morphologically unmarked anticausatives. In this study, we adopt theoretical assumptions from Distributed Morphology that allow an approach on the morphology-syntax relationship, enabling a better understanding of the syntactic representation of the verbal meaning. More precisely, we are grounded in Alexiadou, Anagnostopolou e Schäfer (2015)’s assumptions, according to which causative alternation is an alternation in Voice. These authors highlight that causatives have active Voice introducing the external argument, while anticausatives with anticausative voice morphology instantiate expletive Voice where it is licensed, diverging from unmarked anticausatives, that do not license this head. The results from the argument structure analysis of the two kinds of anticausative sentences – morphologically marked and unmarked – in Guajajára show the following conclusions: i) the vP structure stays the same in marked and unmarked anticausatives; ii) the vP structure of marked and unmarked anticausatives has a v head, which attests the causativization of these sentences; and iii) the morpheme of anticausative Voice {ze-} is not part of the vP projection and, because of this, we assume that such morpheme is licensed in an expletive VoiceP projection, with defective property. On the other hand, the analysis of the reflexive-anticausative syncretism allowed us to verify that, even though it marks reflexive voice and anticausative voice, respectively, the morpheme {ze-} has different syntactic and semantic behaviors in each structure. In other words, in reflexives, we have Voice projecting external argument, while this same Voice is defective in anticausatives and, because of this, does not project external argument, resulting in an expletive head.