Wari’ Intentional State Constructions

Wari’, the last viable language of the Chapakuran family of Brazil and Bolivia, manifests a typologically and theoretically interesting construction for expressing intentional states. I refer to this construction as the Intentional State Construction. The special interest of this construction is that it simultaneously manifests properties of both words and clauses, yet seems difficult to subsume under common definitions of Complex Predicates, mixed categories, or within theories of syntax based strictly on endocentricity. It is argued that these constructions are handled straightfowardly by Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin & LaPolla 1997), in which they are dominated by a non-projecting node (NUC) heading an exocentric unit, Clause.