Brasil

In recent years, much study has been done on languages within the Tupí-Guaraní language family, making possible both phonological (Lemle 1971) and morphological (Jensen 1984) reconstruction of Proto-Tupí-Guaraní as well as a tentative division of the various languages into eight subgroups (Rodrigues 1984–1985). This family is unique within the Tupí trunk in having developed a new set of prefixes for independent verbs along nominative-accusative lines. The present paper presents reconstructions of the prefixes involved in this new system. It shows that in a transitive verb whose object is third person, an object prefix *i- ∼ c- should be reconstructed between the subject prefix and the stem, as in such languages as Guarani and Tupinambá. This analysis is productive as well in explaining the variants of *opo- (second-person plural object with first-person subject) which occur in some languages, apo- and oropo-, as a reanalysis of po- (second-person plural object) analogous to the third-person object prefix. It also provides a basis for explaining the *ti- (first-person plural subject) prefix which occurs in some languages as a derivation from three prefixes: purpose + subject + object (*t-ya-i-).