The phonological and grammatical status of Murui ‘word’

Book Chapter ResearchOnline@JCU
Wojtylak, Katarzyna I.
Abstract

[Extract:] Murui (also called Bue) is a Witotoan language, spoken by about 2,000 people in southern parts of Colombia and in northern parts of Peru. Murui, together with Mɨka, Mɨnɨka, and Nɨpode, forms a dialect chain, referred to more broadly as Witoto, Huitoto, Uitoto, or, more recently, as Murui-Muina (Petersen de Piñeros and Patiño Rosselli 2000; Wojtylak 2017; Agga Calderón, Wojtylak, and Echeverri 2019).1 The internal classification of the Witotoan language family, including the extinct †Miranha-Carapana-Tpuya and †Coeruna documented by Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius (1867: 273–5, 277–9). This chapter will address the issue of how to define wordhood in Murui. I will first introduce the main typological features of the language (§1.1). Then, I will focus on the concept of ‘word’ as understood by the Murui (§1.2) and briefly describe the phonological inventory of the language (§1.3). In §2, I analyse the notion of phonological word, by identifying its segmental (§2.1), prosodic (§2.2), and phonological criteria (§2.3). In §3, I define what constitutes the Murui grammatical word, distinguishing between the nominal (§3.1) and verbal words (§3.2), and discuss the mismatches between phonological and grammatical words, including compounding (mentioned in §3.1), reduplication (§3.3), and clitics (§3.4). Section §4 offers a brief summary.

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Phonological word and grammatical word: a cross-linguistic typology

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ISBN/ISSN

978-0-19-886568-1

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Pages Count

42

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Oxford University Press

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Oxford, U.K.

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DOI

10.1093/oso/9780198865681.003.0005