Purepecha: An isolate non-Mesoamerican language in Mesoamerica

Résumé En

Purepecha (formerly known as Tarascan) is spoken in the state of Michoacán in Mexico by approximately 110,000 people. It is classified as a language isolate. In this chapter, after introducing some of its sociolinguistic and dialectal characteristics, I provide information on a selection of its phonetic and phonological processes (Chamoreau 2009), then highlight the most recent and significant progress in morphological and syntactic description. Verbal derivational morphology in Purepecha is elaborate and highly productive. Stems may be simple or compound. Although bare stems exist, they are typically augmented with various derivational suffixes, in particular locative suffixes, but also voice, causative, positional, directional, desiderative, and/or adverbial derivational suffixes, comprising a total of around eighty markers. The majority of nouns are derived from a verbal stem and built with a nominalizer. Verbs inflect for aspect, tense, and mood and nouns for case by means of suffixes. In simple clauses, Purepecha has nominative-accusative alignment; the basic constituent order is SVO but the language exhibits some traits commonly associated with basic OV order. It is a predominantly dependentmarking language, since the person of subject and object is generally encoded not on the verb but by means of second position enclitics, on the first constituent of a clause. However, in some contexts it exhibits head-marking characteristics (Chamoreau in press b). With respect to complex clauses, the predicates of both independent and dependent clauses are generally finite, although some non-finite dependent clauses have been observed. Here I describe the uses of non-finite and finite dependent clauses and the position of these clauses on the continuum of finiteness in Purepecha (see also Chamoreau in press a). I close this chapter by discussing the question of whether Purepecha belongs within the Mesoamerican linguistic area. This is an interesting question because although the language is located in Mesoamerica, following Smith-Stark (1994), I do not classify it as Mesoamerican as it exhibits very few signature Mesoamerican characteristics.