An Introduction to Nominalizations in the Wapishana Language

Wapishana is an Arawakan language spoken by approximately 7,000 people in northern Brazil and southern Guayana. During July of 2010, Adrian, a speaker of Wapishana traveled to the University of Oregon to participate in an intensive linguistic field methods course during the biennial Institute for Field Linguistics and Language. During this month, Adrian provided speech data for research on nominalizations, nouns formed from other word classes (primarily verbs), in the Wapishana languages My research is the result of the description and analysis of eleven nominalizing suffixes which occurred at the ends of words in elicitation and longer spoken texts recorded during this time. While the primary purpose was to describe the form and characteristics of each nominalizer, I also demonstrate that nominalizations in Wapishana are able to function as relative clauses, a phenomenon that is a common pattern in languages around the world.