A Grammar of Akuntsu a Tupian Language

This dissertation presents a description of the main aspects of Akuntsú grammar, as spoken by five monolingual people who live in the Southeast region of Rondônia state, Brazil. Akuntsú people have until recently been an isolated indigenous group, now the only survivors of genocide. Akuntsú is a critically endangered language. This study presents an analysis of the phonology and morphosyntax of the language. It takes a functional approach to describing the structures of the language and the function that each grammatical component serves. This study is based on fieldwork research carried out since 2004, where the analyses were grounded on several texts. This dissertation introduces aspects of the Akuntsú people and culture in chapter 1; In chapter 2, I describe Akuntsú phonology and relevant aspects of phonological processes found in this language; grammatical categories and word-structures are introduced in chapter 3; nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, ideophones, particles and interjections are discussed in chapter 4, 5, 6 and 7; and simple clause types in chapter 8. Typologically, Akuntsú has been revealed interesting phonological and morphological traits. The stop consonants in Akuntsú have unusual surface representations, such as a voiceless-voiced consonant cluster, which alternate intervocalically and under stress assignment; the morpheme used in the related Makuráp, Tuparí and Mekéns languages (members of the Tuparían subfamily) identified as a genitive classifier to signal possession of animals is, in Akuntsú, replaced by kinship terms, as though possessed animals were now treated as sons or daughters. This lost of the genitive classifier shows that the drastic social changes they have suffered in being reduced to five members is indeed reflected in a particular linguistic construction. Aside from these linguistic traits, languages spoken in Rondônia state in Brazil, such as Akuntsú, have importance, both for their linguistic diversity and for their location in a region, which is claimed to be the main area of the Tupían homeland. The description of Akuntsú, makes it possible to further contribute to linguistic science, especially to the study of historical linguistics in the area.