Basic Word Order and Sentence Types in Kari'ña

The purpose of this research is to study the basic syntactic order in Kari'ña through the analysis of an integrated corpus encopassing simple sentences taken from conversations and texts ellicited from natives. The fieldwork sessions for this work were carried out between January and September of 1996 in Cachama, a village located in the heart of the Kari'ña homeland in northeastern Venezuela. This study covers the primary syntactic elements, i.e. Subject, Verb and Object. As well, some consideration is given to other sentential elements of this language - specially obliques and adverbials. Finally, a survey of some sentence types in Kari'ña is included. In general, the study pursues to determine the prevailing syntactic order in Kari'ña, and to account for the most common arrangements for quotative, intransitive, transitive, ditransitive, copulative, imperative, interrogative and negative sentences.