Harakmbut

This chapter presents a description of Harakmbut, an Amazonian language spoken in Southeast Peru, based on existing work as well as original fieldwork. It focusses on its most vital dialect, Amarakaeri (derogatory term). The discussion of its phonology and phonetics highlights nasality as an important – yet not fully understood – phenomenon. The chapter also presents morphological templates for both (pro)nominal heads and finite verb forms. The description of the noun phrase revolves around the distinction between obligatorily bound nouns and potentially free ones, which leads to distinct morpho-syntactic behaviour in noun modification, noun incorporation and word formation. Going against earlier work, I argue that just a limited number of bound nouns (rather than the whole class) should be analysed as classifiers. The discussion of the verb phrase homes in on the lack of referential transparency in person marking, as well as the abundance of inflectional and derivational morphology, including markers of associated motion and temporal adverbial markers. In the system of argument marking on dependents, the three argument roles (S, A and O) show differential and/or optional marking. At the level of clause-linking, nominalization plays an important role in the expression of relative, complement and adverbial relations.