Lingering relevance: the discourse-driven emergence of the perfect or anterior construction in Kalapalo, Southern Cariban (Brazil)

Resumo

The perfect or anterior in Kalapalo (Southern Cariban)  plays important discourse driven roles in several narrative and ceremonial speech genres. It appears to be a relatively recent feature compared with  descriptions of morphosemantic cognates in Northern Cariban languages.  The basic perfect morpheme atehe, PER is a syntactically and semantically multifunctional hybrid or mixed element,  having both adverbial and verbal features.  A phonologically separate postposition,  atehe references a)  the consequences of prior events involving participants focused in a narrative; b) later situations and experiential consequences of those situations; and c) stance-creating situations appearing in quoted conversations.