Jarawara has an eclectic verbal morphology in which some suffixes cannot have other suffixes added directly to them, and some suffixes cannot be directly added to what precedes. However, phonological word and grammatical word can be straightforwardly defined, and almost always coincide. There are just four circumstances in which one type of word involves two instances of the other. In providing a grammatical description for Jarawara – as for other languages – it is important to distinguish between the structure of a predicate and the structure of a verbal word.

Introduction

The small Arawá family of southern Amazonia (quite distinct from Arawak) consists of five extant languages – Dení, Kulina, Sorowahá, Paumarí and Madi (see Dixon 1999). The Madi language consists of three closely related dialects: Jamamadí (with about 190 speakers), Banawá (about 80 speakers) and Jarawara (about 150 speakers, spread over eight jungle villages). The description of Jarawara given here is based on materials gathered during six field trips, during 1991–99.

Jarawara is a highly synthetic language, basically agglutinative but with developing fusion (particularly in the gender-marking forms of inalienably possessed nouns – see Dixon 1995). There is a closed class of about fourteen adjectives, which only function as modifiers within an NP or as copula complements (other adjectival-type concepts are coded as verbs). Jarawara is head-marking, with the predicate including obligatory markers for S or A, and for O in a transitive clause.