draft manuscript - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

espíritu santo =sui muRa virgen santa maría seweka =sui 373 Ra= uwaRi 1m1nua
Holy Spirit =abl 3sg.ms Virgin Mary womb =abl 3sg.ms= be.born long.ago
‘He became man in the womb of the Virgin Mary. He is of the Holy Spirit and was born of
the womb of the Virgin Mary.’
(see (6.13b))
Finally, in (9.12), =sui licenses the adverbial expression m1t1R1pe 1p1sa ‘midnight’. In modern
Omagua, adverbs, including 1p1sa ‘night, at night’, do not need to be licensed by a postposition,
and we posit that this construction is a calque on Spanish de medianoche ‘at midnight’. Not that
the use of postposition =m1t1R1pe ‘in the middle of’ is itself ungrammatical here, since it appears
before its putative complement, reflecting a morpheme-by-morpheme calque of medianoche.
(9.12) m1t1R1pe 1p1sasui comulgayaRayakatu maRai kuRataRaSi, nuamai utSaya[Ra]RaSi, Ranasawaitimia
santísimo sacramento?
m1t1R1pe 1p1sa =sui comulga =yaRa =ya =katu maRai kuRata
in.middle.of night =abl receive.communion =poss.nomz =sim =intsf thing drink
=RaSi nua =mai utSa =yaRa =RaSi Rana= sawaiti =mia
=nass be.big =inact.nomz sin =poss.nomz =nass 3pl.ms= encounter =irr
santísimo sacramento
Holy Sacrament
‘Drinking in the middle of the night like a communicant, but being a great sinner, would
they receive the Holy Sacrament?’
(see (6.30a))
Uriarte use of Omagua ablative in his diaries likewise suggests calquing of Spanish de ‘of, from’,
as in (9.13), where the ablative is used to express de otro mano ‘from another hand’, which issues
of idiomaticity aside, we would expect to be expressed with the instrumental. 374
(9.13) Roaya amua puasui R[a]umanusenuni.
Roaya
neg
amua
other
pua =sui Ra= umanu =senuni
hand =abl 3sg.ms= die =purp
‘So that he wouldn’t die from another hand.’
(see (8.2b))
9.3.2.3 Extensions of =aRi diffuse locative
Old Omagua exhibited a diffuse locative =aRi, whose modern reflex licenses an oblique argument
that denotes an extended region that serves as a spatial ground with respect to a figure denoted
by another referring expression, and is in contact with that figure. The ecclesiastical texts exhibit
two instances in which presence of the diffuse locative appears to be motivated by the desire to
find an Omagua counterpart to the preposition en ‘on in Spanish verb-plus-particle constructions in
which the preposition does not encode any spatial semantics. These examples include (9.14), from
373 Note that this instance of =sui is grammatical, since the verb uwaRi elsewhere means ’fall’, i.e., it is a motion verb.
374 Note that we do not consider the fact that we know Uriarte’s use of the Omagua ablative to have been calqued
on Spanish de to be sufficient evidence to conclude that Uriarte was the author of the ecclesiastical text sentences
with calques uses of =sui.
138