Candoshi Verb Inflection

1A language spoken by about 2000 Indians living mainly between the Morona and Paztaza Rivers in the northern part of Peru. Two groups of Indians, the Shapras and Muratos, comprise the Candoshi tribe. The Murato dialect is only slightly different from the Shapra; they are mutually intelligible. Data were gathered during field trips to a Shapra community on the Pushaga River in the years 1950-55. The Handbook of South American Indians 3.629 (Washington, 1948) disagrees with Tessman's classification, which agrees with mine, of "Murata" and "Shapra" as subtribes of "Kandoshi." The Handbook 3.248-249 also lists "Murato" and "Zapa" (thought to be Tessman's "Shapera") as tribes in the Zaparoan family, but also gives the information that linguistic data on Zaparoan are very deficient, and the classification of the component languages and dialects confused, with no attempt ever having been made to make the classifications on a scientific linguistic basis. The Candoshi language is not similar to Andoa, the only other language listed in the Zaparoan family with which we have been able to make a comparison. The basis for the system used in this paper of numbering suffixes by centuries and decades was laid by William L. Wonderly (under the direction of C. F. Voegelin) in his Zoque III: Morphological Classes, Affix List, and Verbs, IJAL 17.137-162 (1951). The numbering of affixes in the Totonac On a syntactical or outer distributional level, the first class of verbs is independent, not requiring another verb to complete the utterance. Verbs of the second class are dependent and do require another verb or verbs before the utterance is complete. On a morphological or inner distributional level, any independent verb must have at least a person suffix or suffix implying person. Within this independent group there is also a distinction between those which obligatorily occur with one of a group of suffixes signifying aspect and those which never occur with these suffixes. The first (IA) is independent indicative, and the second group, independent hortatory, is divided further by internal suffixial restrictions into desiderative (IB), imperative (IC), and optative (ID). Dependent verbs are separated into a dependent conditional class, which occurs with Suffix 4513 -o conditional plus affixes of aspect and person, and a second class called nonpersonal dependent, which does not occur with that suffix. On the other hand, the nonpersonal group occurs with