Person auxiliaries in Wayampi

Abstract This article describes person auxiliaries in Wayampi, a language of the Tupi-Guarani family. These elements are syntagmatic forms consisting of a person index and a non-verbal stem that cannot be related to any lexical stem in the contemporary language. Person auxiliaries, cannot function as predicates on their own, always accompany a verbal form with which they constitute a complex predicate. Depending on their role within the predicative verb form in which they appear, they can be either obligatory or optional. The purpose of this paper is to provide an in-depth analysis of these elements and, in particular, to show the essential role they play in the indexation of the transitive verbs in the language. By showing how the concept of person auxiliary is integrated into the Wayampi verbal system, this study contributes to the description of non-hierarchical marking in the Tupi-Guarani family and, more broadly , to the typology of person indexing.