Classes de palavras da língua Zo’é: uma análise comparativa preliminar

Abstract

In this article, partial results of a study conducted with the support of FAPESPA (Pará State Research Foundation), under the Scholarship Institutional Program for Scientific Initiation, are presented and discussed. The study sought to identify classes of words in the Zo'é language and to understand how the process of personal marking occurs in this language. O corpus da pesquisa constituiu-se de publicações dedicadas ao estudo dessa língua, que foram identificadas, selecionadas e extraídas de bases de dados armazenadas na rede mundial de computadores com o auxílio das máquinas de busca Google Scholar e Portal de Periódicos da CAPES. The corpus of the study consisted of publications on the study of this language, which were identified, selected and extracted from databases available on the World Wide Web with the help of the search engines Google Scholar and Capes Journal Portal. The part of the study discussed in this article consists of a brief description of the word classes of the Zo’é language, found in the research corpus, and a preliminary comparison of these classes with those of the Portuguese and English languages. The results indicate that the linguists studying Zo'é have identified eight word classes in this language, most of which are equivalent to those in Portuguese and English. A significant difference separating the Zo’é language from the other two is the fact that some verb forms are used as noun modifiers in Zo’é. Another difference is the non-occurrence of state verbs in the Zo’é language. In addition, it was observed that, unlike what happens in Portuguese and English, where prepositions are considered as a word class, in Zo’é, there are only postpositions, forming a word class of their own. Nor are there any traces of numerals and interjections as word classes in this language. There is, however, the class of particles in Zo’é, which – despite not having any correspondence in Portuguese – has some similarity with the classification of words in the English language since some authors consider particles as a minor class of words in this language. The embryonic stage of studies on the morphology of the Zo'é language was a limiting factor for the research.