Exceto onde especificado diferentemente, a matéria publicada neste periódico é licenciada sob forma de uma licença Creative Commons-Atribuição 4.

Several Indigenous languages of Brazil have few speakers; in at least one case one speaker only (Xipaya), in most cases a few tens (Mekens), in other cases a few hundred (Apurinã), and in rare cases a few thousand (Tikuna). In most cases, the original language is being replaced by the dominant language, Portuguese. In this article, the issues concerning the current state of vitality of Amazonian Indigenous languages will be addressed, as well as resources and strategies available to work with the communities. The aim is to identify the main causes of language loss, and the paths required to maintain these languages in the long run. The Apurinã language, which belongs to the Arawak linguistic family, will be discussed as a point of departure for addressing the issues of revitalization and engagements. The Apurinã people themselves, numbering approximately seven thousand, live mainly along the tributaries of the Purus river in Southwestern Amazonia. It was noticed that better results were achieved through a collaborative work with the community, as the diversity of spoken language could be included in the teaching materials. Furthermore, the Indigenous authors could feel the authorship that also strengthened the adoption of the materials. Yet, more work is still needed to recreate functional domains for the language to be used, and these domains shall include contemporary everyday activities as well as storytelling, rituals and chants, but also the creation of new public spaces for language use. The power relations with the dominant society are also key elements in designing Indigenous languages materials according to the population's interests, and their particular linguistic characteristics.

This paper presents and discusses the first Universal Dependencies treebank for the Apurinã language. The treebank contains 76 fully annotated sentences, applies 14 parts-of-speech, as well as seven augmented or new features -some of which are unique to Apurinã. The construction of the treebank has also served as an opportunity to develop finite-state description of the language and facilitate the transfer of open-source infrastructure possibilities to an endangered language of the Amazon. The source materials used in the initial treebank represent fieldwork practices where not all tokens of all sentences are equally annotated. For this reason, establishing regular annotation practices for the entire Apurinã treebank is an ongoing project.

A natureza semântica dos sistemas de classificação nominal tem recebido muita atenção na literatura linguística, em termos de sua semântica subjacente, gramática e, em menor extensão, de propriedades discursivo-pragmáticas (ADAMS, 1986; vários artigos em CRAIG, 1986; CORBETT, 1991; AIKHENVALD, 2003; entre muitos outros). Menos atenção, no entanto, tem sido dada a sistemas de classificação também usados com funções mais derivacionais, em que um nome classificatório é frequentemente usado para expandir o vocabulário da língua. A fim de ilustrar a propriedade definidora de tais nomes classificatórios, podemos compará-los com um sistema de classificação típico, tal como os classificadores numerais tailandeses (Sino-Tibetano, Tailândia). Em tailandês, um classificador numeral como kon, usado para pessoas, como em kru?u song kon (professor dois CLF) „dois professores?, é empregado para quantificar referentes humanos no discurso. Em Apurinã (Aruák), um nome classificatório como tãta „casca (de árvore)? pode ser produtivamente usado para derivar novos lexemas, tais como uku-tãta (uku-casca de árvore) „casca de “uku” (espécie de árvore)?; e uky-tãta (olho-casca) „óculos?. Se descrevermos as propriedades de tais nomes classificatórios como mapeamentos de uma fonte para domínios semânticos alvo, é possível determinar qual informação semântica está sendo perdida ou preservada, já que cada nome classificatório é usado como parte de diferentes formas de palavras. Tendo estabelecido os domínios fonte e alvo, podemos encontrar as propriedades semânticas específicas sendo mapeadas entre os domínios. Os resultados revelam um sistema de propriedades semânticas nucleares subjacentes aos vários mapeamentos, o qual emerge em termos de esquemas comparáveis àqueles usados para motivar metáforas (LAKOFF, 1987; LAKOFF, JOHNSON, 1986; JOHNSON, 1987). Finalmente, tendo encontrado as propriedades semânticas subjacentes ao uso dos nomes classificatórios em Apurinã, podemos compará-los a termos de classe típicos em tailandês e, em seguida, abordar a questão do lugar de tais sistemas classificatórios na tipologia geral de sistemas de classificação.PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Nomes Classificatórios. Classificação Nominal. Apurinã. Aruák.

Apurinã (Arawak), spoken along several tributaries of Purus River (Southwest of Amazonas State, Brazil), presents a plural morphological system that marks pronouns and nouns. The language has some free pronominal forms that distinguish singular from plural; additionally, it has bound pronominal forms, with singular/plural distinction made only in the first person for the enclitic forms. In the case of nouns, there are two suffixes that mark plural, -waku (that occurs only with [+human] nouns, as kyky-waku-ry (man-pl-m) ‘men’), and -ny (that can occurs both, with [+human] nouns, as in pupỹka-ry-ny-ry (indigenous person-m-pl-m) ‘indigenous people’; or [-human] nouns, as in aiku-ny-ry (house-pl-m) ‘houses’). The language also presents some quantifiers and numerals that encode number syntactically. The quantifiers are ithu, kaiãu and kuna kamuny to encode the notion of ‘much’, puiãu, referring to ‘some/few/little’, and ykyny to mean ‘all/every’. Additionally, there are the following numerals: (h)ãty(tu) ‘one’ and epi ‘two’, which combine to derive higher numbers, and the word for ‘hand’, waku/ piu, indicating the numeral five. Thus, the plural marking in the language can be marked in different ways, none of which is, however, required by the grammar. With that in mind, we discuss the extent to which plural marking is, to a great extent, constructed by the speakers in daily language use, according to whether it is contextually important to do so, and raise the question of the relevance of this problem to a computationally implementable grammar of the language