Wariʼ language

Consonants

The ’Oro Nao’ dialect of Wariʼ as described by Everett & Kern (1997) has the following consonant phonemes. It is a relatively large inventory by Lowland Amazonian standards. The angled brackets represent the spellings associated with each sound.

/t̪͡ʙ̥/ is made up of a bilabial trill preceded by a dental stop. In ’Oro Não’, this sound only occurs before /o/ and /y/, appears almost exclusively in older speakers, and is sometimes allophonic with [t], being entirely replaced by [t] in some idiolects. In some dialects it is a separate phoneme; however, only about 24 words contain the sound, some of which are onomatopoeic.

Vowels

Wariʼ has one of the world's most asymmetrical vowel systems. Vowels are generally expected to be somewhat evenly distributed in the vowel space, not bunched into a corner. Additionally, vowels are expected to be unrounded when front and rounded when back until "gaps" in the vowel systems have been filled. Although Wariʼ has only six vowels, four of these are close/close-mid front vowels, of which two are rounded (although /ø/ is uncommon). Non-native speakers have marked difficulty in distinguishing these front vowels, that contrast with only a single back vowel /o/.

Vowel nasalisation occurs on diphthongs only; the few which are not nasalised all end in /i/. The following diphthongs occur in the Oro Nao dialect: [ẽĩ], [ãĩ], [aɪ], [õĩ], [oɪ], [ỹĩ], [ĩõ], [ẽõ], [ãõ].

Syllables

The basic syllable in Wari' is CV(C)(C), but suffixes can be of the form VC, VCVC or V. Only stops and nasals can occur in syllable codas. Consonant clusters are rare: /n/ is the only first segment found, and /t/, /k/ and /t͡ʃ/ are the only second segments found in non-compound words.

Wariʼ has words ending in the consonant clusters /mʔ/ and /nʔ/. These have been analysed as single sounds, but apparently only to avoid complicating syllable structure. If these are separate phonemes, these clusters only occur word finally.

In the Oro Nao dialect, many consonants alternate with [ʔC] at the beginning of monosyllabic words, and [ʔ] always precedes word initial semivowels ([j] and [w]), including in polysyllabic words. There is a correlation between words that begin [ʔC] in Oro Nao and words that begin [ʔaC] in other dialects. For example, 'water' is ⟨com⟩ [ʔkom] in Oro Nao and ⟨'acom⟩ [ʔaˈkom] in other dialects. Loss of this initial syllable is a potential explanation of why these words have variants that break the phonotactic rules. However, these generalisations do not always hold; for instance 'thorn' ⟨pi⟩ [ʔpi] is pronounced the same in all dialects.

Stress

The final syllable of words in major lexical categories is stressed. The verb tends to take the primary stress, with secondary stress on the others. However, emphasis of a particular word can cause transfer of the primary stress.

Possession

Wariʼ has two main classes of nouns:

1. xiʼ nouns (named as such because their citation form ends with the suffix /-xiʼ/)
2. non-xiʼ nouns

Xiʼ nouns are inalienably possessed, and therefore have a paradigm of possession marking suffixes.

Some forms have allomorphs, especially when following stems that ends in the vowel [e], for instance -con becomes -cun and -cam becomes -quem.

There is also a paradigm of nominal inflectional clitics that inflect for person, number and third person gender. These are used to show possession of a non-xiʼ noun.

Most xiʼ nouns have alternate forms which cannot be possessed. To signify possession of these forms, the inalienable xiʼ counterparts must be used. For example, to convey the meaning 'his bone or leg', the xiʼ form of the noun (araxiʼ) with the third person masculine singular ending must be used. The nonpossessed form of the noun ('at) cannot be used with the third person masculine singular nominal inflectional clitic.

Reduplication

Clitics

Wariʼ has both verbal and nominal inflectional clitics, which are analysed as such and not affixes for a few reasons. Verbal inflectional clitics can occur as whole utterances as responses, as the referent is clear from the previous statement. They also do not undergo the phonological processes that is expected if they were suffixes to the main verb, for instance they do not take the primary stress, which the possessive suffixes do when they attach to xiʼ nouns.

Verbal inflectional clitics are inflected for person, number, tense, third person gender (only if tenseless), voice, and contain both the subject and the object of the verb. Where there is more than one object, the clitic represents one object based on the semantic roles present in the following hierarchy:

GOAL>CIRCUMSTANCE>THEME>BENEFACTIVE>COMITATIVE>LOCATION>TIME.

Morphophonological processes

Wariʼ has three types of assimilatory process – regressive (or anticipatory), progressive (or preservative) and coalescent. This mainly occurs across word-initial morpheme boundaries.

Regressive assimilation occurs at morpheme boundaries involving consonants, where the consonant of the suffix causes a change in the consonant of the stem. This happens when xiʼ nouns with stems that end in -ji inflect for third person masculine or feminine, as the /k/ in the suffix causes the /y/ in the stem to become /ts/:

Progressive assimilation occurs over morpheme boundaries between nasal consonants or diphthongs and voiceless stops. This type of assimilation is optional but common in normal speech, however does not seem to appear in careful speech: Mon te? 'Where is my father?' can be pronounced as either [mon'de] or [mon'te].

Coalescence is the most common assimilatory process, which is often accompanied by regressive vowel harmony. There are three principles which guide the output of vowel coalescence.

1. If one of the two vowels is a back vowel, the output vowel will be a back vowel: xiri- 'house' + -u '1S' = xuru 'my house'
2. The output vowel will have the height of the highest vowel of the two input vowels: toco- 'eye' + -um '2S' = tucum 'their eyes'
3. If the input vowels are identical, the output vowel is identical (this only occurs with /i/+/i/ in the corpus collected by Everett and Kern (1997)).

COMP sentences

COMP sentences are referred to as such by Everett and Kern (1997) because their initial position is occupied by what they refer to as a COMP or complementizer word. These give the sentence – or a variable in the sentence – a particular interpretation.

For a sentence to be a COMP sentence, it must have a COMP word in the initial position, an inflectional morpheme closely following which gives information about tense, mood, and sometimes gender, and a tenseless verbal inflectional clitic following the verb.

Here is a list of the COMP words found in the Oro Nao dialect.

Copular sentences

Wariʼ does not have a copula verb, so sentences that would use this instead have what would be the adjective become the verb.

Definiteness

Wariʼ does not have any articles. Definiteness or indefiniteness can be expressed by either the use of demonstratives or verbal inflectional clitics containing the object. However this latter option does not always distinguish definiteness, as indefinite objects can also be marked in the inflectional clitics.