The lasts in line: a revision of verbal suffixes in Maká (Mataguayan)

Abstract

This article presents a revision of a set of morphemes from Maká (Mataguayan family) that were classified as clitics in previous descriptions of the language (Gerzenstein, 1994, p. 117). The first-hand data, collected in the last decade, shed light on various aspects of this set of morphemes that allow us to postulate that they are actually affixes (not clitics) with different semantic values. As will be seen throughout the article, these morphemes present some of the prototypical characteristics of clitics (Spencer and Luís, 2012; Haspelmath and Sims, 2010), but they also present characteristics of affixes. Likewise, although all these morphemes have a similar distribution, they have very diverse semantic functions: directional, locative, aspect, among others. In this article we propose an exhaustive classification of these morphemes that takes into account both their form, their function and their meaning. To do this, we collected data using the technique of sentence elicitation and storytelling. We also contrast the data obtained with the second-hand data present in grammars, dictionaries and stories in the language. This allowed us to conclude that the morphemes under study are closer to affixes than to prototypical clitics. In addition, we classify the set of morphemes according to their semantic value as locative, directional, reciprocal and aspectual.