draft manuscript - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

is attested in modern Omagua, although it is exceedingly rare. Both morphemes form part of a
set of second-position clitics that are exclusively dedicated to encoding epistemic modality. 49 In
general, given the degree of language attrition in the remaining Omagua speach community, the
use of epistemic modal markers is uncommon in both natural and elicited speech, and as such, our
description of =tina relies heavily on that of Vallejos Yopán for Kokama-Kokamilla (see references
above). In contrast to =tina, Vallejos Yopán (2010a:269) only briefly describes a cognate to Old
Omagua =semai (i.e., -tseme), as an emphatic marker. 50 We are able to utilize a higher number of
attestations of =semai in the ecclesiastical texts, as well as from modern Omagua data, in order to
draw descriptive conclusions with regard to this morpheme.
The certainty marker =tina expresses certainty on the part of the speaker with regard to the truth
value of the proposition at hand. The examples in (2.17) and (2.18) represent the only attestations
of =tina in the ecclesiastical texts. In the former, the first constituent is the independent pronoun
muRa 3sg.ms; in the latter it is the adverb muRiapai ‘uninterruptedly’. 51
(2.17) muRatina aisetui Dios aisetui awa weRanu, yeneyaRa yeneyumunyepetataRa.
muRa =tina aise -tui Dios aise -tui awa weRanu yene= yaRa yene=
3sg.ms =cert true -? God true -? man coord 1pl.incl= lord 1pl.incl=
yumunuyepeta
redeem
-taRa
-act.nomz
‘He [Jesus] is the true God and a true man, as well as our redeemer.’
(example (6.15b))
(2.18) yenesawakana muRiapaitina Ranakak1R1aRi.
yene= sawa =kana muRiapai =tina Rana= kak1R1 =aRi
1pl.incl= soul =pl.ms uninterruptedly =cert 3pl.ms= live =impf
‘Our souls will live forever.’
(example (6.22b))
The veridical marker =semai expresses the speaker’s assertion (i.e., highlighting) of the truth
value of the proposition at hand. A pragmatic extension of this highlighting effect is that the truth
value of the proposition is interpreted as obtaining to a higher or greater degree, and because of
this, translations of clauses containing =semai often include adverbs such as very or truly, whereas
translations of clauses containing =tina do not, because in the latter case, it is the speaker’s certainty
regarding the truth value of a proposition, and not the truth value itself, that is being asserted.
There are five attestations of the veridical =semai in the ecclesiastical texts, two of which are
49 Others include Omagua =taku and Kokama-Kokamilla =taka (Vallejos Yopán 2010a:496-498), a dubitative marker,
as well as the Kokama-Kokamilla “speculative” and “reportative” markers =Ray and =ía Vallejos Yopán (2010a:492-
496). The latter two morphemes are likely reconstructable to Proto-Omagua-Kokama given cognates in other
Tupí-Guaraní cognates (e.g., Tupinambá RaPé (Lemos Barbosa 1956:367-368)), but reflexes of these forms are not
attested in modern Omagua, likely due to language attrition (see above). None of the above forms are attested in
the ecclesiastical texts.
50 Kokama-Kokamilla -tseme is also found on a number of frozen stems in that language (see O’Hagan (2011:121)).
51 We argue that the constituent yenesawakana ‘our souls’ is extra-clausal based on the fact that the adverb muRiapai
elsewhere in the these texts occurs only clause-initially, and because of the presence of the resumptive pronoun
Rana= 3pl.ms. This construction, namely that involving an extra-clausal referent that is coreferential with a
resumptive pronoun inside the clause, is information-structurally marked and is utilized to highlight contrastive
topics (Sandy and O’Hagan 2012a), and we argue that here sawakana ‘souls’ indeed functions as a contrastive topic
(see (6.20)-(6.21) for discourse context).
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