Finitude e a distinção entre nominalização e oração subordinada completiva em Wayoro

This paper focuses on the properties of finiteness in syntactic environments: matrix sentence, (infinitive) subordinate clause, and nominalization. In several languages, there is a morpheme that creates nouns from intransitive and transitive verbs with the meaning of “a place where ‘verb’ happens” or “an instrument for ‘verbing’” (COMRIE; THOMPSON, 2007, p. 340). In the Wayoro language (Tupari subfamily, Tupian), this morpheme is {-p∼-m} ‘nominalizer’. However, we noticed constructions with {-p∼-m} that appear as complement of verbs and that show properties of clauses. Are these complements better analyzed as nominalizations or as subordinate clauses? The properties of main clauses — person marking, valency-changing morphemes, tense and aspect markers — serve to compare the subordinate clauses and the nominalizations. Based on the morphosyntactic finiteness features, we analyze as nominalization the construction that behaves syntactically as a noun phrase without any finiteness feature. We analyze as a subordinate (infinitive) clause the {-p∼-m} construction which functions as an object of a verb and allows aspect markers and expression of argument structure.