Cavineña language

Cavineña is an indigenous language spoken on the Amazonian plains of northern Bolivia by over 1,000 Cavineño people. Although Cavineña is still spoken (and still learned by some children), it is an endangered language. Guillaume (2004) states that about 1200 people speak the language, out of a population of around 1700. Nearly all Cavineña are bilingual in Spanish.

The Cavineño people live in several communities near the Beni River, which flows north from the Andes. The nearest towns are Reyes (to the south) and Riberalta (to the north).

Phonology
Where the practical orthography is different from IPA, it is shown between angled brackets:

Examples in the morphology and syntax sections are written in the practical orthography.

Verbs
Verbs do not show agreement with their arguments, but are inflected for tense, aspect, mood, negation, and aktionsart, among other categories. There are six tense, aspect, or mood affixes:

The following examples show the remote past and perfective affixes:

'Me, I was resting with my wife in my mosquito net.'

'You fell from the mango tree.'

Aktionsart suffixes include:

The following examples show the completive and reiterative suffixes:

'(They ran away and) left all their arrows and bags behind.'

'After about ten years or so, the man went hunting again.'

Cavineña is the first language in the Amazon for which an antipassive voice has been described.

Subtypes of nouns
There are three subtypes of nouns in Cavineña:
 * 1) e-nouns, which are a closed class of about 100 to 150 terms which must take a prefix e-.  (The prefix is realised as y- before the vowel a).
 * 2) kinship nouns, which are a small class of about 30 terms which are obligatorily inflected for their possessor.
 * 3) independent nouns, which are an open class of a couple of thousand terms. Independent nouns do not take any e- prefix nor any possessor inflections.

Case marking
Case marking on noun phrases is shown through a set of clitic postpositions, including the following:

The dative and genitive cases are homophonous.

Pronouns (independent or bound) also show these case distinctions.

The following example shows several of the case markers in context:

'Me, I was resting with my wife in my mosquito net.'

'You fell from the mango tree.'

'What did you shoot?'

Order in noun phrases
Noun phrases show the order:


 * (Relative Clause)-(Quantifier)-(Possessor)-Noun-(Adjective)-(Plural marker)-(Relative clause)

The following examples show some of these orders.

NPF-cooking:pot big=PL

'big cooking pots'

all 3PL:GEN bedding=PL RES-burn-LIG

'all their bedding that had burnt'

(The clitic =ke 'ligature' appears at the end of a relative clause.)

Pronouns
Pronouns in Cavineña can appear in either independent or bound forms. The two kinds of pronouns are pronounced almost exactly the same, but the bound pronouns appear in second position, after the first word of the sentence. Independent pronouns tend to be contrastive, and usually appear first in the sentence.

The following pronouns are found:

notes that the formative suffix -ke (of singular absolutive bound pronouns) and the ergative suffix -ra (in ergative bound pronouns) do not show up when absolutive or ergative pronouns occur last among the second position clitics.

Sentences
Cavineña has ergative case marking on the subject of a transitive verb. For sentences with a non-pronominal subject, this is shown with an ergative case clitic /=ra/:

'The jaguar killed the chicken.'

For a sentence with a pronominal subject, there are distinct ergative and absolutive forms of the pronouns:

'I just went.'

'I do not know my father.'

Verbs do not inflect for the person of the subject or other arguments in the clause. Instead, a set of clitic pronouns occurs in the second position of the clause, as in the following examples:

'I will go and bring bananas for them.'

'I am sending a package to my relative.'

The clitics are ordered so that 3rd person pronouns precede 2nd person pronouns, which precede 1st person pronouns. (Some of the clitic pronouns in these examples have a formative element /-ke/ after them and some do not.)