Possessive marking strategies in Mehináku (Arawak)

: In this paper, I describe the possessive constructions in Mehináku, highlighting the types of strategies found in the language, so far, to express possession relationships. I present two major types of possession constructions: (i) nominal (also known as attributive) possession, and (ii) predicative possessive constructions, which involve both the use of nouns and verbs. Regarding nominal possession, Mehináku, like other Arawak languages (PAYNE, 1991; AIKHENVALD, 1999), recognizes a split between inalienably possessed and alienably possessed nouns, expressed through the attribution of different morphemes to these nouns. Inalienable nouns, for example, receive fewer morphological formatives, including only the marks of person and agreement with possessor and number, whereas alienable nouns can occur without the presence of an obligatory possessor. In this case, they will carry, in addition to the morphological formatives that appear in the inalienable nouns, specific morphemes of alienable possession. Predicative possession constructions, in turn, are formed mainly by juxtaposition, but also by other strategies, such as prefixing the attributive morpheme ka - ( k -, before vowels) to the noun or verb; or through the suffixation of the existential morpheme = waka , among other possibilities.


Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to describe the main strategies for marking nominal and verbal possession in the Mehináku language. The methodology used in this research includes the collection of natural speech data, carried out during my fieldwork between the years 2016 to 2019, and its subsequent linguistic treatment, in terms of translation, transcription and glossing of the data. The collections were carried out in the Utawana village, due to its proximity to the city of Gaúcha do Norte, Mato Grosso, which reduced the costs of access and permanence in this community. The examples were translated with the help of the speakers, especially Yatapi, Waxamani, Yutá, Kauruma and Wayeru Mehináku, whom I thank in advance. I also carried out data collection in the city of Campinas (São Paulo), on the arrival of the aforementioned indigenous people to this city.
Data collection comprised two steps: (i) recording samples of natural speech, including stories, songs, and excerpts from everyday dialogues and (ii) lexical and grammatical data elicitation. Regarding the samples of natural speech, I collected about 20 traditional stories, from which I use some excerpts in this paper, indicating the name of the story in parentheses at the end of the example.
Elicitation was based on lexical questionnaires for specific elicitation purposes, as suggested by Samarin (1967), Kibrik (1977), Payne (1997), Vaux and Cooper (1999), Dixon (2007), among others. I also considered the suggested questions included in The Language Descriptive Studies Quiestionnaire (COMRIE;SMITH, 1977), and in the questionnaires for typological studies, made available by the Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute (www.eva. mpg.de). Some elicitations were also made based on research questions that emerged during the development of the research. 1 To achieve these goals, the article is divided as follows: in section §2, I briefly introduce the Mehináku language and people; in section §3, I present examples of analysis of the attributive nominal possession and, in section §4, I present examples of possessive predicates and the forms of expression of possession in these predicates, such as juxtaposition and the use of existential and attributive morphemes.
According to Corbera Mori (2008), unlike some other indigenous peoples, in the case of the Mehináku there is a close correlation between the number of the population and the number of speakers: all members of the Mehináku villages speak their mother tongue. Men over 60 are usually monolingual, speaking only the indigenous language. Similarly, older women speak only Mehináku. Some younger women understand Portuguese but speak very little. Many young men, by contrast, speak Portuguese with some fluency. However, when they go out to sell handicrafts in cities like Campinas, São Paulo, and Brasília, among others, they like to speak in their own language.
The Mehináku people currently live in four villages: Uyaipiyuku, the largest among the four; Utawana, the second largest; Kaupüna and Aturua. The Utawana village is the closest to the urban perimeter, located about 35 kilometers from the city of Gaúcha do Norte (MT) and maintains a certain proximity to the Kaupüna and Aturua villages, so it is possible to move from one to the other more quickly, by car during the low river, or by boat during the flood period. Uyaipiyuku village, in turn, is the farthest of the four villages from the urban perimeter and is situated approximately 4 hours by boat from Utawana village.
Regarding Mehináku demography, there is no consensus among researchers on the exact current number of indigenous peoples of this ethnicity living in these villages, and the numbers may vary between 200 (MOSELEY, 2010), 300 (CORBERA MORI, 2011;350 (AWETÍ, 2014). In de Felipe (2020), I defended an approximate number of 400 people, but in a recent survey I conducted a recount, excluding from the total indigenous peoples of other ethnicities who live among the Mehináku (mainly because of marriages), and the total number of indigenous people suffered a sharp drop. The current number of indigenous people living in the four Mehináku villages is approximately 326 people (DE FELIPE, 2020, p. 26).
The Mehináku language belongs to the Arawak family. This family, also known as Aruák, is the largest linguistic family in South America (PAYNE, 1991;AIKHENVALD, 2001;RAMIREZ, 2001). In Aikhenvald's classification (1999b), the Mehináku, together with the Wauja and the Yawalapiti, is included in the Pareci-Xingu group, Xingu subgroup.

Nominal possession
I begin the presentation of the possession category in Mehináku by the constructions that involve the possession of nouns, also known in the literature as nominal possession or attributive possession (CHAPPELL;MCGREGOR, 1996). In this section I describe 16 types of constructions of nominal possession in Mehináku, taking into account three criteria: (i) the split between inalienable and alienable nouns, since each of these nouns, when they figure in possessive constructions, will carry a set of specific formatives; (ii) the type of possessive construction, which in this section will be attributive possession; and (iii) the types of possessor of these constructions, because there are morphological differences in the possessed nouns depending on the type of possessor they take.
The Mehináku language, like the other Arawak languages (PAYNE, 1991;AIKHENVALD, 1999b), recognizes a split between inalienably possessed and alienably possessed nouns, expressed through the attribution of different morphological formatives to these nouns. Inalienable nouns (i.e., those inherently possessed) will be assigned less morphological formatives, including only the marks of person and agreement with the possessor and number, while alienable nouns -those that are not inherently possessed and which, although may appear in possessive constructions, can occur in the language without being necessarily associated with any possessor -will be assigned, in addition to the morphological formatives that appear in the inalienable nouns, by specific possession morphemes.
These two types of nouns will be characterized from their behavior in possessive attributive constructions. The definition of this type of possession that I use is the one proposed by Chappell and McGregor (1996), for whom the construction of Attributive Possession is one in which the possessor and the possessed item form a kind of possessive phrase, as in sentences like "Pedro's car" or "his book". The Mehináku language, however, has a number of strategies that reflect changes in the types of morphological formatives that attach to alienable and inalienable nouns, when there is more than one possessor and when there is more than one noun being possessed, which is why I add to the proposal by Krasnoukhova (2012) (8) For convenience, in the following subsections I present these constructions in pairs, organized according to the type of possessor of each one. Thus, taking the inalienable possessive constructions as examples, I present together: constructions with a single pronominal possessor of only one inalienable noun (1) and more than one inalienable noun (2); constructions with more than one pronominal possessor of only one inalienable noun (3) and more than one inalienable noun (4); constructions with a single lexical possessor of a single inalienable noun (5) and more than one inalienable noun (6) and, finally, constructions with more than one lexical possessor of a single inalienable noun (7) and more than an inalienable noun (8). The same applies to constructions of alienable possession.

1 Constructions involving inalienable nouns
The inalienable nouns, in Mehináku, are those obligatorily possessed. This means that the items included in this class cannot occur (without manifesting morphological change) unless a clearly delimited possessor is present. From a semantic point of view, the terms for body parts, kinship terms and some items culturally very close to their owners, such as 'bow' , 'lice' , 'rope' , 'path' , 'porridge' , etc., belong to the class of inalienable nouns (CORBERA MORI, 2011). Although these nouns are inherently possessed, there are cases where these nouns occur without the possessor, as I describe below.

1. 1 Inalienable nouns when not possessed
The cases in which the inalienable nouns occur without the possessor generally refer to isolated or extreme episodes, in which it is necessary to refer to one of these nouns without being possible to associate them with a specific possessor, or to cases in which he is referring to objects very close to their possessors. There are three strategies found in Mehináku to indicate that a noun appears dispossessed: (i) the adjunction of the suffix {-i}; (ii) the change in vowel quality; and (iii) the change in stress position (CORBERA MORI, 2007;2011).
The first strategy, as I mentioned, is to add the suffix -i to the dispossessed noun. This suffix, whose form reconstructed by Payne (1991) is *-tʃi, has received several nomenclatures in the linguistic literature, such as "non-possessed" (RICHARDS, 1973), "absolute" (PAYNE, 1991) and "impersonal" (AIKHENVALD, 2001). Here, I treat this morpheme as "non-possessed" (nposs). This is the most common pattern for tagging dispossessed nouns in Mehináku, since other strategies, as shown below, are restricted to nouns with specific structures. There is a change of accent from the last syllable of the root of the noun not possessed to the penultimate syllable of the word possessed: The second strategy is to change the quality of the last vowel of the dispossessed word. Unlike the first strategy, whose occurrence is quite varied, the words that undergo this type of process have one characteristic in common: they all end with the central vowel [ɨ] when possessed. In addition, the accent is changed from the last syllable of the word of the form not possessed to the penultimate syllable of the word of the form possessed: The third strategy is to change the stress position: inalienable nouns with an accent on the last syllable, when not possessed, will have an accent on the penultimate syllable, when possessed. A unique feature of these nouns is that they all end with [i]: Carvalho (2015) provides a diachronic proposal for the treatment of nominal possession in Mehináku. The author proposes that the absolute forms of nouns, which in the language can be represented by one of the three strategies I showed above: {-i} suffixation (eg: teˈwe-i tooth-nposs 'someone's tooth'  nu =ˈtewe 1sg=tooth 'my tooth'); change in vowel quality (eg: maˈpi 'skin'  nu=ˈmapɨ 'my skin') and change in accent position (eg: kiˈri 'nose'  nu=ˈkiri 'my nose'), are due to historical changes that have transformed the absolute suffix *-ʧi > -i, leading to the following developments: 2 (i) suffixation of -i plus change of accent to the right (PA *teˈweʧi > teˈwei 'tooth'; (ii) change in vowel quality plus accent to the right (PA *maˈpɨʧi > PM *maˈpɨi > PM *maˈpii > maˈpi 'skin'); and (iii) accent change to the right (PA *kiˈriʧi > PM *kiˈrii > kiˈri 'nose').
Kinship terms, though they are also inalienable in Mehináku, have not appeared dispossessed in my corpus. In this sense, I agree with Ball (2007), who, when dealing with nominal possession in Wauja, Arawak's sister language of the Mehináku and with which this language shares a variety of similarities, states that inalienable nouns are maximally conceptual and may never appear outside of possessive constructions. Therefore, they never appear with the non-possessed suffix.
Furthermore, this division between three possible ways of indicating that a noun appears without a possessor, which includes segmental and suprasegmental strategies, is unusual for the Arawak languages, and further studies, with the other Xinguan languages, need to be done to verify whether this is a unique typological characteristic to the languages of this subgroup.

1. 2 Inalienable nouns when possessed
After presenting the unpossessed forms of inalienable nouns, it is now necessary to deal with how those nouns behave when they are possessed. In these cases, which are the most frequent in the language, two types of possessors can be added to them. Pronominal possessors, represented by proclitics indicative of person, and lexical possessors, represented by proper nouns of animate possessors, such as people and animals, generally. As mentioned earlier, there are differences in morphological terms between inalienable constructions with a single possessor, and those with more than one possessor. The table below summarizes the behavior of morphological formatives attached to inalienable nouns in Mehináku: In the following subsections, I present each of these examples in more detail.

1. 2. 1 Constructions involving pronominal possessor of inalienable noun and inalienable nouns
In this type of construction there is a single possessor, and it is represented by the personal proclitics. These proclitics, which represent the pronominal possessor, are appended to the left of the noun, forming a construction of the pronoun-noun type, as shown below:  When there is more than one inalienable noun being possessed by a single possessor, the above structure is maintained, in terms of appending the pronominal proclitic, but the plural and collective morphemes are appended to the possessed nouns, as in the examples below, which illustrate the other cases:

1. 2. 2 Constructions involving pronominal possessors of inalienable noun and inalienable nouns
The second type of possessive attributive construction with inalienable nouns that I deal with is that involving more than one pronominal possessor. Among the proclitics that can function as pronominal possessors in Mehináku, only the third person {ɨ=} figure in this type of construction. I argue that the use of this morpheme as the only representative of more than one possessor has to do with the fact that it is also the only one in the language that does not have an autonomous form; the same prefix is used to mark the third singular and plural person. Thus, although other pronouns, such as {a=} '1pl' and {ji=} '2pl' , also embrace the idea 3 There is no difference, in Mehináku, between third person singular and third person plural, which is why I represent it using only 3.
Revista da Anpoll, v.54, n.1, e1611, 2023 Possessive marking strategies in Mehináku (Arawak) of more than one person as possessor in Mehináku, the language has developed another type of morphological marking, which employs one or more pronominal possessors, in order to eliminate the ambiguity that could generate the use of this proclitic in constructions of possession.
The morphological way to mark this difference between possessors in this language is the addition of the suffix {-pa} to the possessed inalienable nouns. These nouns then receive, in addition to the pronominal proclitic indicative of possessor, the suffix {-pa}, responsible for indicating that it is more than one pronominal possessor ('they'): In cases where there is more than one item being possessed by more than one possessor, the plural morpheme corresponding to the item's animacy degree is added before {-pa}: In this case, the inalienable noun of the possessive attributive construction receives three formatives: a third-person proclitic, a plural marker suffix (human or non-human), and a third-person plural suffix.

1. 2. 3 Constructions involving lexical possessor of inalienable noun and inalienable nouns
The third type of possessive attributive construction with inalienable nouns is one that involves a single lexical possessor. In this type of construction there is the co-occurrence of the lexical and the pronominal possessor, forming a kind of redundancy for marking possessors. The pronominal possessor used to reaffirm the presence of the lexical possessor is the third person formative {ɨ=}, as seen in the following examples: It is possible to see from these examples that lexical possessors do not appear attached to inalienable nouns, as occurs with pronominal prefixes. What happens, in this case, is the retaking of the lexical possessor via a third-person pronominal prefix attached to the inalienable noun.
When there is more than one item being possessed by a lexical possessor, the structure is the same as when there was only the pronominal possessor, with the presence of the lexical possessor being the only difference between these types of construction:

1. 2. 4 Constructions involving lexical possessors of inalienable noun and inalienable nouns
The fourth and final type of attributive possessive construction involving inalienable nouns is one in which there is more than one lexical possessor in the construction. In this case, in addition to the third-person indicative proclitic {ɨ=}, which we saw above with a single possessor, there will be the suffix -pa, responsible for indicating the third-person plural. As there are two possessors, it is necessary to point out the plural character of these possessors ("they"), which is why the suffix {-pa} is used: Note that, in these cases, where there is more than one possessor, the inalienable noun is marked by both the third-person pronominal proclitic and the third-person pluralizing suffix, whose function is to indicate that the inalienable items are possessed by more than one possessor.
When more than one item is possessed by more than one lexical possessor, the above construction holds, but the plural morpheme (for human or non-human) is added before the third person plural morpheme:

2 Constructions involving alienable nouns
Alienable nouns are those not necessarily possessed. In general, this property is recognized by the fact that such nouns, when not possessed, bear no mark and, when possessed, display a suffix characterizing possession. In Mehináku, this suffix is represented by {-la} and its allomorphs {-la ~ -le ~ -ɾa ~ -ʂa}. It is also possible, according to Corbera Mori (2011), that this type of possession is marked by lexically conditioned allomorphs, such as the change from oral vowel to nasalized vowel (V > Ṽ), from unstressed vowel to stressed vowel (V > ˈV), in addition to the presence of a morpheme {Ø}. Following the example of what I did with inalienable nouns, I present below the eight types of attributive possession construction with alienable nouns in Mehináku. The table below summarizes the behavior of morphological formatives attached to alienable nouns in the language:  I present in the following subsections some examples of possessive construction involving alienable nouns.
When in a construction of attributive possession with a single pronominal possessor, an alienable noun will receive two formatives: a personal proclitic, responsible for indicating the possessor, and a possessive suffix, responsible for characterizing alienable possession. As with the inalienable nouns, there is a distinction in the alienable possession in relation to the third person. In constructions where there is more than one alienable item being possessed by a single possessor, the plural suffix is added after the noun. In the case of alienable nouns, there is no distinction between plural morphemes according to the animacy of the referent, since possessed animate referents are always inalienable. The inanimate plural morphemes -tɨpe or collective, such as =taku, will be appended to alienable nouns:

2. 2 Constructions involving pronominal possessor of alienable noun and alienable nouns
When there is more than one possessor of a single alienable noun, this item receives, in addition to the personal proclitic indicative of the possessor, also the suffixes indicating possession and third person plural: In constructions with more than one item being possessed by more than one possessor, in addition to the suffixes above, the plural is added: The third type of attributive possessive construction with alienable nouns is one that involves a single lexical possessor of a single item. What happens in this type of construction is the same as with inalienable nouns, with the difference that, for alienable nouns, it will be necessary to add the possession characterizing marker. Thus, in this type of construction there is the co-occurrence In constructions with more than one noun possessed by a single lexical possessor, the plural or collective morpheme is also added: When there is more than one lexical possessor for a single item in the possessive construction, in addition to the third person prefix {ɨ=}, which we saw above with a single possessor, there will be the suffix {-la}, indicative of alienable possession, and the suffix {-pa}, which indicates the third person plural:

3 Nouns that cannot be possessed
Non-possessable nouns do not receive any kind of grammatical formation of possession, and include proper names of people (Atapulu, Waxamani, Wayeru, Tukuyari, Yawakumalu), of places (Campinas, Utawana, Kaupüna, Aturua), names of celestial stars (kamɨ 'sun' , keʂɨ 'moon' , kalutɨ 'star') and of divine entities (Kuwamutɨ, Atuʂuwá). Some of these nouns can only be possessed in purely pragmatic contexts, such as when drawing the sun in a school drawing, as nu=kamɨ 1SG=sun 'my sun (my sun drawing)' .

Possessive predicative constructions
Once the attributive possession constructions are presented, that is, those that involve the possession of nouns, it is also necessary to deal with the predicative constructions of possession, which can be both non-verbal (involving nouns) and verbal. As with the attributive constructions I showed earlier, most predicative constructions are built from juxtaposition in Mehináku, and there are two main strategies: the first is simple juxtaposition, without any morphological marking, while the second is use of the attributive morpheme =ka, which as its name suggests, assigns the property "have x" to the construction.
Examples of non-verbal predicative possessive constructions of the first type are given below. Note that, in all cases, the =pai morpheme occurs, which attests to the predicative character of this formative, since in most non-verbal constructions it is used. Its occurrence is also quite recurrent, as it occurs with quantifiers (35), postpositions (36), numerals (37) Possessive predicative constructions built from the attachment of the attributive ka= (or k=, before themes starting with a vowel), in turn, can either be realized from the simple attachment of this morpheme to the noun or verb, or through the joint attachment of the attributive morpheme and the existential morpheme. In these cases, the attributive starts to indicate, as opposed to the private =ma, that x has y. In the following examples, I show examples with verbs (40) and nouns (41) As I mentioned earlier, it is also possible to construct an attributive sentence by using the existential =waka after the attributive. In these cases, the attributive seems to suffer reduplication, as shown below: Finally, there are still some types of possessive predicative construction in Mehináku that, unlike the others presented above, could be considered verbal, because they seem to be constructed from the use of a verbal form whose value is equivalent to 'have/exist' . This form is kuma, which in all the data I have, is accompanied by the predicator =pai and at the beginning of sentences. Note, in (48), that kuma can still receive the impersonal formative kɨna, which seems to attest to its verbal treatment, since in general verbs receive the impersonal formative and the imperfective =pai at the same time. However, as I have only found examples of the use of kuma in elicited data and not in stories or accounts, I present it here together with the non-verbal possessive constructions. More data is needed to confirm its use as a possible predicative possessive construction.

Conclusion
In this paper, I have presented the main possession marking strategies in Mehináku, including those that involve only nouns (attributive possession) and those that involve the use of nouns and verbs in predicative constructions (possessive predicative constructions). Regarding nominal possession, Mehináku, like other Arawak languages (PAYNE, 1991;AIKHENVALD, 1999b), recognizes a split between inalienably possessed and alienably possessed nouns, expressed through the attribution of different morphemes to these nouns. Inalienable nouns, for example, receive fewer morphological formatives, including only the marks of person and agreement with possessor and number, whereas alienable nouns can occur without the presence of an obligatory possessor. In this case, they will carry, in addition to the morphological formatives that appear in the inalienable nouns, specific morphemes of alienable possession.
Predicative possession constructions, in turn, are formed mainly by juxtaposition, but also by other strategies, such as prefixing the attributive morpheme ka-(k-, before vowels) to the noun or verb, or through the suffixation of the existential morpheme =waka, among other possibilities.