2023/09/25 by Dunn, Saskia
paper · doi:10.25501/soas.00040380
A number of Tukanoan languages of South America are noted for their parallel semantically negative verbs ‘to not be’ and ‘to not have’. This paper reconstructs the history of both forms, showing that they developed independently as complex forms first in Proto Tukanoan (‘to not have’) and then in Proto Eastern Tukanoan (‘to not be’), and also proposes two negative particles present in these proto stages of the language family: *bã (Proto Eastern Tukanoan) and *p’e (Proto Tukanoan). These results will be discussed in the context of two negative cycles: the established Negative Existential Cycle and the recently proposed Privative Cycle.