The indefinite person: A journey across Arawak languages

A few of the world’s languages have a marker indicating an indefinite possessor or an indefinite subject. Eight Arawak languages, belonging to five subgroups, have a prefix *i-, with the meanings of indefinite, or unspecified, possessor and subject on nominalizations and a focused and unspecified subject on verbs. Three of these languages, all of them members of the Uapuí subgroup in the Upper Rio Negro region, add to this a marker of generic, or impersonal, possessor and subject, translatable as ‘one’ or ‘someone,’ thus creating an unusual five-term set of person values. Notwithstanding the brevity of the prefix’s form, its shared functions and geographical spread point toward its antiquity. This article offers an in-depth investigation of semantic and syntactic features of the indefinite person prefix on nouns and on verbs and suggests possible scenarios for its historical development.