Abstract

This thesis is a corpus-based description of the attributive suffix -k in Pastaza Kichwa, a Quechuan language spoken in lowland Amazonian Ecuador. The goal of this work is, first, to describe the behaviors, characteristics, and functions of the suffix using data from the Corpus of Pastaza Kichwa (Rice 2018a), and second, to offer a typological analysis of these behaviors in order to identify the most appropriate classification for the suffix. The suffix has previously been described as a nominalizer (Nuckolls & Swanson, forthcoming), and the equivalent suffix in other Quechuan varieties has been described as an agentive nominal relativizer (Weber 1983; Weber 1989; Cole 1985; Lefebvre & Muysken 1988) or a participle (Markham 1864; Weber 1989; Guardia Mayorga 1973; Catta Quelen 1985; Debenbach-Salazar Saenz 1993, Muysken 1994). This work claims that the function of the -k suffix in Pastaza Kichwa more closely conforms to crosslinguistic descriptions of active participial functions. After introducing Pastaza Kichwa and the -k suffix, I use numerous examples to describe the behavior of the suffix. The data is taken from the Corpus of Pastaza Kichwa, which is composed of 40 narrative texts and contains 32,127 tokens. 846 examples of the -k suffix are found in the corpus. Following the presentation of the data, I offer an analysis based on previous descriptions of nominalizations and participles in Quechuan languages, as well as typological descriptions of nominalizations and participles crosslinguistically. I rely chiefly on the typological description of participles found in Shagal (2017) to conclude that verb + -k forms function as active (or nominative) participles in Pastaza Kichwa.

Degree

College and Department

Humanities; Linguistics and English Language

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