draft manuscript - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

synchronic I, namely greater confusion between I and i, such that instances of phonemic I would be
written as . Inconsistencies of this sort are, for example, common with instances of 1. However,
segments corresponding to modern I are always represented orthographically as , leading us to
conclude that raising to I had not yet occurred at this stage of Old Omagua. 17
Old Omagua also exhibited a series of diphthongs of falling sonority, which are also present
synchronically: ai, ui and a1. The diphthong 1i, attested synchronically, is not attested in the Jesuit
texts, presumably because the small class of words in which it occurs are not attested.
2.2 Morphology
2.2.1 Person-Marking
Omagua verbal arguments can be expressed by referential NPs, free pronouns and phonologicallydependent
elements that we refer to as ‘pronominal proclitics’. These pronominal proclitics also
serve to express possessors pronominally in possessive constructions. Due to their grammatical
importance, and to the fact that they are neither properly nominal nor verbal morphology, we
discuss them in this section, prior to discussing nominal or verbal morphology as such.
We begin our discussion of Old Omagua person-marking by presenting the modern Omagua
person-marking system in §2.2.1.1. We do so in part because the Old Omagua pronominal system,
as attested in the Old Omagua texts, appears to be essentially the same as the modern one, with
minor differences in the form of the markers.
All forms present in the Jesuit texts are attested synchronically, but because of a genderlect
distinction in pronominal forms, and the later innovation of new pronominal forms with certain
syntactic and information-structural distributions (not discussed here), only a subset of pronouns
attested today are attested in the texts. In §2.2.1.2 we discuss synchronic vowel hiatus resolution
strategies that inform our transliteration of the original orthography.
2.2.1.1 Paradigms
Omagua expresses the person and number of verbal arguments via free pronouns and pronominal
proclitics whose forms are related. While free pronouns may function as the arguments of verbal
and non-verbal predicates, pronominal proclitics may function as the arguments of verbal predicates
only (see below). In this function they must have a rightward phonological host: when the proclitic
is a subject, the host is the verb root; when it is an object, the host is a VP-enclitic. 18 Referential
NPs and coreferential pronominal proclitics do not typically co-occur, although they may in certain
information-structurally marked contexts. The proclitics additionally function as the possessors
of nouns and as the complements of postpositions, in which case the nominal and postpositional
head serve as the phonological host. The realization of a free pronoun versus pronominal proclitic
is determined by a complex set of interacting factors, including the presence of VP-final enclitics,
word order and information structure, which are not discussed further here.
Omagua pronouns distinguish three persons in the singular and plural, and a clusivity contrast.
First and third person forms are sensitive to the gender of the speaker (as opposed to the referent),
and are part of a broader genderlect system within the language. 19 Table 2.2 presents Omagua
17 Note that POK *e did not raise in Kokama-Kokamilla (see Vallejos Yopán (2010a:106)).
18 In the absence of an enclitic that may serve as a host, the object surfaces as a free pronoun, or in the case of third
person objects, it deletes.
19 Genderlect systems have been reported in other Tupí-Guaraní languages, as well as in Tupian languages outside
of the Tupí-Guaraní subgroup. In Kayabí (Tupí-Guaraní), third-person singular object pronouns and prefixes are
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