Compound: incorporated auxiliary of a compound verb
In Nheengatu, compounds are hyphenated orthographical words and generally correspond to a single syntactic word. Some auxiliaries, however, incorporate into the main verb, building a complex verb, reminiscent of V-V compound verbs in Japanese (Kageyama, 2016). In these auxiliary verb constructions of Nheengatu, only the main verb inflects for person and number, the auxiliary remaining in its basic (non-finite) form. These auxiliary forms are marked with Compound=Yes.
Yes: non-finite auxiliary form in a V-V compound
Examples
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Pitunawasú ramé ti yaxipiaka-kwáu maã. “When it’s dark we can’t see anything.” (Hartt, 362, adap., apud Avila, 2021)
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Ayuíri-putari se retama kití. “I want to return to my land.” (Moore et al., 1994, adap.)
The highlighted verb compounds have two components: the inflected main verb and the non-inflected auxiliary, yaxipiaka ‘1p:see’ and kwáu ‘can’ in the former example, ayuíri ‘1s:return’ and putari ‘want’ in the latter, respectively. The second component, the auxiliary verb, is assigned Compound=Yes. The first component, the main verb with the 1st person singular active prefix, is assigned number and person features, but not Compound=Yes.
References
Kageyama, T. (2016). 8. Verb-compounding and verb-incorporation. In T. Kageyama & H. Kishimoto (Ed.), Handbook of Japanese Lexicon and Word Formation (pp. 273-310). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614512097-012
Compound in other languages: [la] [ro] [sa] [yrl]