Temporal interpretation of negative clauses in Karitiana

Abstract

This paper presents a study about temporal interpretation in negative clauses in Karitiana (ISO 639-3: ktn). Karitiana is a language of the Arikém family and Tupi stock (RODRIGUES, 1986, p. 46) and it has a future vs. non-future system (STORTO, 2002; MÜLLER; FERREIRA, 2020). Semantically, time is a relation between a topic time and the utterance time (KLEIN, 2013). This language expresses time through suffixes which are present in affirmative clauses, but absent in negative clauses (STORTO, 2018). Thus, our goal was to verify how temporal interpretation happens in negative environments in which tense is absent. Our hypothesis were: (i) that temporal interpretation is contextually determined or (ii) that temporal interpretation is determined grammatically by other factors. In order to test them, we elaborated a test in two steps: (i) Contextualized data elicitation of audios with a native speaker of negative clauses in the future and in the past and (ii) presenting the audios without the context to another native speaker so he could translate them. This test has shown that negative clauses without the appropriate context are interpreted in the non-future corroborating the second hypothesis. Data elicitation for semantic analysis is generally made using contexts (MATTHEWSON, 2004; SANCHEZ-MENDES, 2014). However, this test has shown that translation without a context can be an important methodological tool when one wishes to verify if there are grammatical mechanisms not salient to the linguist determining the interpretation.