Rupturing implicature in the Mapudungun verbal system" The suffix -Fi

Abstract

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 verbal suffix -FI 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 Indoeuropean languages.