Gender agreement in Huni-Kuin Portuguese noun phrases

This work presents the first description of the variable gender agreement in nominal phrases in Huni-Kuin Portuguese, which is the specific Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese variety used as second language by the Huni-Kuin people (which belongs to the Panoan ethnolinguistic family). Our corpus was extracted from eight spontaneous speeches collected during a fieldtrip to the cities of Cruzeiro do Sul and Marechal Thaumaturgo, and five villages of the Breu River Reserve. We analyzed the presence/absence of gender agreement in modifiers/determiners considering different word classes (articles, adjectives, possessive pronouns, quantifiers) and the gender of the noun head (masculine/feminine). We could observe that the overgeneralization of the masculine gender (unmarked) is not the only strategy that makes gender agreement in Huni-Kuin Portuguese distinct from L1 speakers’ patterns. In the class of possessive pronouns, it seems possible to represent the gender of a human possessor. Structures indicating that the gender of a modifier/determiner in Huni-Kuin Portuguese can be conditioned by the noun head of an embedded adjunct were also identified. This process suggests the transfer of a Panoan characteristic: a strong relation between the right border of a linguistic form and the expression of core grammatical functions.