Elena Mihas, Department of English

The talk focuses on the classifying morphemes in Ashéninka Perené, of the Kampan subgrouping of Arawak. It discusses the inventory of classifiers in Ashéninka, their morphosyntactic loci, semantics, functions, and origin, and presents the preliminary results from the fieldwork data collected in Ashéninka communities of eastern Peru. The results show that Ashéninka has an elaborate set of classifiers optionally assigned to nominal and verbal hosts. Noun classifiers categorize inanimate nouns in terms of their shape, dimensionality, consistency, and amount while the categorization of verbal classifiers is based on the semantic parameters of function, arrangement and amount.