‘And the word became’ particles in Nheengatú

Abstract

Studies on language contact allow us to observe borrowing hierarchies to the different words classes of a language. These hierarchies indicate, for instance, that nouns are more easily transferred from one language to another than verbs, which can be inserted into the target language as verbs, with morphological adaptation, or as particles. In this article, we present the case of four verbal expressions of Portuguese that were introduced in Nheengatú, the Amazonian língua geral in contact with Portuguese since the 16th century, as particles of deontic modality – tenki from ‘tem que’ and presizu from ‘é preciso’ – and as question markers – será from ‘será’, and seraki from ‘será que’. For this purpose, we first introduce the criteria for distinguishing a class of particles in Nheengatú, then apply them to verbal particles borrowed from Portuguese. This analysis corroborates studies indicating that modality markers are higher in borrowing hierarchies than other forms of TAM. However, in the Nheengatú, we observe that expressions of epistemic modality can be adapted in the target language as grammatical markers of interrogative sentences, considered more difficult to occur as loans.

Keywords
Language contact; Particles; Loanwords; Modality; Question markers; Borrowing hierarchies