Chapter 3

Nonverbal predication in Paresi-Haliti

The Paresi people, who number approximately 3000, live in Mato Grosso, Brazil. The following types of predicates are found: nominal, adjectival, locational, existential and possessive predicates. There are three types of strategies used: verbless predicates, the use of the copula tyaona, and the use of prefixes. The source of the copula may be its homonymous form tyaona ‘live, be born, happen’. It has a more restricted use in nominal and adjectival predicates, with the meaning ‘become’ (similar to a semi-copula), and takes aspectual markers. Nominal predicates can be further semantically classified into identity or predicational statements (Stassen 1997). In locative predicates, a copula is used when the the personal proclitics are used instead of full noun phrases. Existential predicates are formed by the existential verb aka. Possessive predicates are formed by prefixes, a strategy which is not common cross-linguistically. They may be derived from inalienable (plant parts and kinship terms) and alienable nouns through the attributive ka-. Its negative counterpart, the prefix ma-, derives private stative predicates from nouns and stative verbs.