Rupturing implicature in the Mapudungun verbal system: the suffix -fï

GOLLUSCIO LUCIA

JOURNAL OF PRAGMATICS

NORTH-HOLLAND

Año: 2000 vol. 32 p. 239 - 263

0378-2166

This paper focuses on the analysis of the meaning of the verbal suffix -Fi in the frame of the Tense-Aspect-Modality system in Mapudungun. A few recent works have recognized some other features of this marker - traditionally described as a past tense marker - related to modal meaning, counterexpectation, or rupture of current condition of facts. I argue that the Verval suffix - F1 is a metapragmatic operator that acts to warn against, block, or rupture conventional implicature in speech. The present study intends to be a contribution to crosslinguistic research in Pragmatics, since those grammatical categories that express the speaker´s alerting to the implicature created in speech seem to be widely spread in American Indian languages, in contrast to Indoeu-ropean languages.