Negation and Irrealis in Mojeño Trinitario

The chapter by Rose draws a sketch of negation in Mojeño Trinitario, an underdescribed South Arawak language spoken in Amazonian Bolivia, and discusses its interaction with irrealis. It starts with presenting the different negation markers and constructions used for each negation type: sentential negation (including the expression of apprehensive, and negation in subordinate clauses), free form answer, constituent negation, existential negation, negative indefinites and privative derivation. The paper then discusses the most interesting point in the expression of negation in Mojeño Trinitario, i.e. its interaction with irrealis. First, irrealis marking is obligatory both in sentential negation and in existential negation. Second, standard negation induces a realis/irrealis coding that is distinct from that occurring in affirmative clauses. This paper argues that standard negation is of the constructional asymmetric type: a negative clause is asymmetric with a corresponding positive clause, on the basis of obligatory irrealis marking and the placement of some TAM and discourse markers on the negative word. In the end, it points to how the encoding of the irrealis may be complex in the languages where the irrealis category covers a wide range of meanings including negation, since irrealis encoding is then redundant with negation encoding. The coding of negation varies greatly within the Arawak family (Aikhenvald 1999: 96). This paper offers additional data for comparative purposes. It provides a sketch of negation in Mojeño Trinitario,1 an underdescribed South Arawak language spoken by a few thousand speakers in Amazonian Bolivia. The data consists of oral Trinitario texts collected by the author in the field since 2005. This paper offers a description of the different negation markers and constructions used for each negation type (sentential negation, free form negative * I would like to express my gratitude to Patience Epps and the editors for suggestions on an earlier version of the paper. All remaining errors are mine. 1 The Mojeño language consists of four dialects, two of which are still actively spoken, though endangered: Ignaciano and Trinitario. negation and irrealis in mojeño trinitario 217 answer, constituent negation, existential negation, negative indefinites andprivative derivation). It also discusses themost interesting point in the expression of negation in Mojeño Trinitario, i.e. its interaction with irrealis, found both in sentential negation and in existential negation. This paper eventually argues that standard negation, i.e. the basic way for negating declarative verbal main clauses, is of the constructional asymmetric type, since it induces realis/irrealis coding that is distinct from that occurring in affirmative clauses. The first section of this paper focuses on the different negationmarkers and constructions used for each negation types. The second section describes the forms and functions of the irrealismarkers. The third section then concentrates on the interaction between negation and irrealismarking inMojeño Trinitario. 1 Negation Types in Mojeño Trinitario This section presents the different constructions andmarkers used for the various types of negation inMojeño Trinitario, depending on the overall meaning of the negated sentence and on the specific syntactic function of the negated element. It leaves aside for the time being the interaction of negationwith irrealis. 1.1 Sentential Negation Sentential negation is marked with the negative element wo ~ wi or wo’i in sentence-initial position. This element is found immediately before a verbal predicate, as in (1), as well as before a nominal predicate (2) or an adjective (3). No intervening constituent is normally allowed, the subject of the predicate, when expressed with an NP, always follows the predicate.2 (1) Wipo tanigia to waka.3 [neg pred(v) np.s] wo-po ta-ni-ko-a to waka neg-perf 3nh-eat-actv-irr art.nh cow ‘The cows do not eat any more.’ 2 In some examples, the main verb is introduced by a non-human article. 3 The Trinitario dialect has such a complex system of morphophonemic rules (including vowel deletion) that underlying morphemes are often not recognizable in the phonological realization. This explains the formatting of the Trinitario illustrative examples, with the first line giving a phonological transcription of the utterance (using the local orthography) and the second line giving the morpheme break with the underlying form of the morphemes.