Nominal Agreement Class Assignment in Tikuna (Isolate, Western Amazonia): a Dynamic Process Conditioned by Both Lexicon and Context

Abstract

Tikuna (isolate, western Amazonia) features a system of five nominal agreement classes: Feminine, Masculine, Neuter, Salientive, and Non-Salientive. Like in well-known Indo-European gender languages, the targets of class agreement (nominal modifiers and pronominal morphemes, essentially) obligatorily agree in class with the participant they relate to. Tikuna, however, usually offers several options of class assignment to given participants in discourse, and even allows participants to change class over the course of a single discourse performance. A participant designated by means of the noun kŏwǘ ‘deer’ may thus be assigned to any class except Neuter, suggesting that lexical properties of nouns cannot fully account for class assignment. I argue that the primary factor underlying class assignment (and reassignment) in Tikuna are the inherent semantic and pragmatic values of each class. Lexical properties and, occasionally, the class assignment of other participants in the immediate context, do come into play, but as secondary factors. Flexibility and secondary reliance on lexical information are the most visibly divergent characteristics of class assignment in Tikuna relative to typical Indo-European gender systems.