Lev Michael | UC Berkeley (original) (raw)

Papers by Lev Michael

Interface Focus, 2022

Version comments: The authors' final version is uploaded here. For the published version (with co... more Version comments: The authors' final version is uploaded here. For the published version (with corrections) and supplementary materials, go to the journal: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2022.0049

Abstract: This paper identifies time calibration points for accurately rooting and dating the phylogeny of Arawakan, the largest Indigenous linguistic family of the Americas. We present and model a methodology for extracting calibration points from the archaeological record, based on principles of geographical overlap between archaeological sites and Arawakan peoples, and on continuity in material culture between archaeological finds and modern Arawakan practices. Based on a consensus model of the expansion of the Arawakan family from Central Amazonia, we focus on archaeological finds in Arawakan expansion zones, where Arawakan material culture abruptly appears in a given region, and where only a single major Arawakan subgroup/clade is present. We find 12 calibration points from archaeological sites in Arawakan expansion zones and also identify more recent calibration points from the historical record based on first mentions of ethnonyms and early sources of lexical data.

With some 108 independent genealogical units, South America is the linguistically most diverse re... more With some 108 independent genealogical units, South America is the linguistically most diverse region of our planet and presents a particular challenge to linguists seeking to understand the genealogical relationships among human languages. Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the internal classification of South American language families, and this article provides a critical overview of research in this very active area, fo- cusing on the seven largest language families of the continent: Arawakan, Cariban, Jê, Panoan, Quechuan, Tukanoan, and Tupian. The strengths and weaknesses of major classification proposals are examined, and directions for future research discussed. Several long-distance relationship proposals that South Americanists are actively debating, including Tupi-Cariban, Pano- Takanan, Quechumaran, TuKaJê, and Macro-Jê, are also examined.

Cadernos de Etnolingüística, 2020

Evidentiality has captured the attention of many socially-oriented students of language because o... more Evidentiality has captured the attention of many socially-oriented students of language because of its relevance to the communicative construction of authority, responsibility, and entitlement. With regards specifically to responsibility, previous work has focused on the role of evidentiality in reducing speakers' responsibility for the factuality of utterances, an example of a broader phenomenon that I call 'discourse attribute responsibility'. In this paper I combine ethnographically-informed analyses of interactions among speakers of Nanti, an Arawakan language of Peruvian Amazonia, with grammatical analyses of Nanti evidentials and evidential strategies to show that Nantis deploy these resources to negotiate their own and others' moral responsibility for happenings in the world, a form of responsibility that I call 'event respon-sibility'. I argue that the efficacy of evidentials and evidential strategies in modulating event responsibility results from a chain of inferences that begings with understandings of the proto-typical circumstances under which particular evidentials are used, and leads to inferences about the spatial relationship of the speaker to the event in question, which in turn leads interactants to make inferences about the nature of the speaker's involvement, and thus, causal responsibility, for the event. Combined with cultural understandings about causal and moral responsibility, interactants reach conclusions regarding the moral responsibility of the speaker for the event in question.

Journal of Historical Linguistics, 2019

It has recently been argued that Arawakan languages of South America provide evidence for a novel... more It has recently been argued that Arawakan languages of South America provide evidence for a novel historical source for standard negation, a privative derivational affix. This hypothesis posits that the prefixal standard negation found in some languages of the family developed from a privative prefix, ma-, present in Proto-Arawakan, that originally derived privative stative verbs from nouns. According to this account, the function of this prefix extended, in many languages of the family, to negating nominalized verbs in subordinate clauses, and then, via insubordination, to standard main clause negation, in a smaller subset of languages. The purpose of this paper is to substantiate this hypothetical trajectory in detail in a particular Arawakan language: Lokono, a highly endangered language of the Guianas. On the basis of modern linguistic fieldwork and colonial-era language materials, we show that 18th-century Lokono exhibited a standard negation construction based on the privative, and that this construction exhibits clear signs of its subordinate clause origin. We show that Lokono also exhibits the full range of functions for the privative ma- that are predicted to be historical precursors to the standard negation function, substantiating the historical trajectory from privative derivation to standard negation. We conclude by observing that the prefixal standard negation strategy has lost ground since the 18th century to a standard negation particle that originally expressed constituent negation, possibly due to contact with colonial languages that employ similar strategies.

Language and Linguistics Compass

In recent years, South Americanist linguists have embraced computational phylogenetic methods to ... more In recent years, South Americanist linguists have embraced computational phylogenetic methods to resolve the numerous outstanding questions about the genealogi-cal relationships among the languages of the continent. We provide a critical review of the methods and language classification results that have accumulated thus far, emphasizing the superiority of character-based methods over distance-based ones and the importance of developing adequate comparative datasets for producing well-resolved classifications.

Cadernos de Etnolingüística, 2019

This paper argues for a significant typological distinction among lines in indigenous genres of v... more This paper argues for a significant typological distinction among lines in indigenous genres of verbal art of the Americas: those which are crucially defined by the size and number of prosodic elements constituting them, and those that are not subject to prosodic restrictions of this type, but are instead delimited by a variety of line edge-marking strategies. I refer to these broad classes of lines as metrical lines and edge-marked lines, respectively. Genres of verbal art studied within the ethnopoetics tradition have mainly focused on those with latter type of line, mirroring an apparent rarity of verbal art genres in the Americas with metrical lines. This paper describes karintaa, a genre of extemporaneous verbal art performed by an Amazonian indigenous group, the Arawakan Nantis of southeastern Peru, which exhibits lines with strict prosodic sizes, and examines the morphological and morpho-phonological strategies that performers employ to satisfy this size requirement. I conclude by observing that while metrical genres of verbal art may be less common in the Americas in comparison to edge-marking genres, such as the Kuna chant genres described by Sherzer, they are clearly to be found.

LIAMES, 2019

The question of where Proto-Tupí-Guaraní (PTG) was spoken has been a point of considerable debate... more The question of where Proto-Tupí-Guaraní (PTG) was spoken has been a point of considerable debate. Both northeastern and southwestern Amazonian homelands having been proposed, with evidence from both archaeology and linguistic classification playing key roles in this debate. In this paper we demonstrate that the application of linguistic migration theory to a recent phylogenetic classification of the Tupí-Guaraní family lends strong support to a northeastern Amazonian homeland.

Resumen: La cuestión de dónde fue hablado el proto-tupí-guaraní (PTG) ha sido un punto de debate considerable. Se han propuesto puntos de origen en el noreste y en el suroeste amazónicos, sustentados mayormente a través de evidencia arqueológica y de clasificaciones lingüísticas. En este artículo demostramos que la aplicación de la teoría de migración lingüística a una reciente clasificación filogenética de la familia tupí-guaraní favorece la hipótesis de un punto de origen amazónico nororiental. palabras claves: Tupí-Guaraní; Lingüística histórica; Filogenética; Territorio de protolengua.

Journal of Historical Linguistics, 2018

This article describes the evolution of past/perfective subject-verb agreement morphology in the ... more This article describes the evolution of past/perfective subject-verb agreement morphology in the Tukanoan family, reconstructing relevant aspects of Proto-Tukanoan verbal morphology and delineating the subsequent diachronic development of verbal subject agreement morphology in the Eastern branch of the family. We argue that suffixes that cumulatively expone past/perfective and person, number, and gender (png) subject agreement resulted from the fusion of post-verbal demonstratives/pronouns expressing png information with suffixes expressing past/perfective tam information. We propose that different png agreement categories developed at successive stages in the diversification of the family, with third person masculine singular subject agreement emerging before other png categories, followed by animate plural agreement, then finally by the development of third person feminine agreement. The result in Eastern Tukanoan was a cross-linguistically unusual agreement system that contrasts four agreement categories: (i) first and second person singular and third person inanimate (singular and plural); (ii) third person animate masculine singular; (iii) third person animate feminine singular; and (iv) third animate plural.

This paper presents an internal classification of Tupí-Guaraní based on a Bayesian phylogenetic a... more This paper presents an internal classification of Tupí-Guaraní based on a Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of lexical data from 30 Tupí-Guaraní languages and 2 non-Tupí-Guaraní Tupian languages, Awetí and Mawé. A Bayesian phylogenetic analysis using a generalized binary cognate gain and loss model was carried out on a character table based on the binary coding of cognate sets, which were formed with attention to semantic shift. The classification shows greater internal structure than previous ones, but is congruent with them in several ways.

This article describes the reality status system of Nanti (Arawak) and argues that it constitutes... more This article describes the reality status system of Nanti (Arawak) and argues that it constitutes an instance of a canonical reality status system. The relevance of such a system is examined in the light of literature that casts doubt on the typological validity of reality status as crosslinguistic grammatical category. It is shown that reality status is an obligatory inflectional category in Nanti, and that the distribution of realis and irrealis marking across Nanti construction types hews closely to expectations based on notional understandings of " realis " and " irrealis " categories grounded in a contrast between " realized " and " un-realized " situations. It is also shown that the Nanti reality status system does not exhibit evidence of being based, either synchronically or diachronically, on semantically narrower notions that could account for the distribution of reality status marking in the language, without recourse to the more generalized notions of realized and unrealized events. It is suggested that the Nanti reality status system might serve as a suitable canonical system around which a canonical typology of reality status might be built.

This paper describes the Core and Periphery technique, a quantitative method for exploring areali... more This paper describes the Core and Periphery technique, a quantitative method for exploring areality that uses a naive Bayes classifier, a statistical tool for inferring class membership based on training sets assembled from members of those classes. The Core and Periphery technique is applied to the exploration of phonological areality in the Andes and surrounding lowland regions, based on the South American Phonological Inventory database (SAPhon 1.1.3; Michael, Stark, and Chang 2013). Evidence is found for a phonological area centering on the Andean highlands, and extending to parts of the northern and central Andean foothills regions, the Chaco, and Patagonia. Evidence is also found for Southern and North-Central phonological sub-areas within this larger phonological area.

Under conditions of language contact, a language may gain features from its neighbors that it is ... more Under conditions of language contact, a language may gain features from its neighbors that it is unlikely to have gained endogenously. We describe a method for evaluating pairs of languages for potential contact by comparing a null hypothesis, in which a target language obtained all its features by inheritance, with an alternative hypothesis in which the target language obtained its features via inheritance and via contact with a proposed donor language. Under the alternative hypothesis, the donor may influence the target to gain features, but not to lose features. When applied to a database of phonological characters in South American languages, this method proves useful for detecting the effects of relatively mild and recent contact, and for highlighting several potential linguistic areas in South America.

Cabral (1995, 2007, 2011) and Cabral and Rodrigues (2003) established that Kokama and Omagua, clo... more Cabral (1995, 2007, 2011) and Cabral and Rodrigues (2003) established that Kokama and Omagua, closely-related indigenous languages spoken in Peruvian and Brazilian Amazonia, emerged as the result of intense language contact between speakers of a Tupí-Guaraní language and speakers of non-Tupí-Guaraní languages. Cabral (1995, 2007) further argued that the language contact which led to the development of Kokama and Omagua transpired in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, in the Jesuit mission settlements located in the provincia de Maynas (corresponding roughly to modern northern Peruvian Amazonia). In this paper I argue that Omagua and Kokama were not the product of colonial-era language contact, but were rather the outcome of language contact in the Pre-Columbian period. I show that a close examination of 17th and 18th century missionary chronicles, Jesuit texts written in Omagua and Kokama, and modern data on these languages, make it clear that Omagua and Kokama already existed in a form similar to their modern forms by the time European missionaries arrived in Maynas in the 17th century. Moreover, I show that several key claims regarding ethnic mixing and Jesuit language policy that Cabral adduces in favor of a colonial-era origin for Kokama are not supported by the available historical materials. Ruling out a colonial-era origin for Omagua and Kokama, I conclude that Proto-Omagua-Kokama, the parent language from which Omagua and Kokama derive, was a Pre-Columbian contact language.

International Journal of American Linguistics, 2013

ABSTRACT

This paper describes two quotation strategies employed by speakers of Nanti, one involving gramma... more This paper describes two quotation strategies employed by speakers of Nanti, one involving grammaticalized quotatives and another involving complement-taking verbs of saying, and examines the consequences of the pragmatic differences between these strategies for two key questions in the study of evidentiality: first, the importance of degree of grammaticalization in delimiting ‘evidentials’; and second, the importance of the analytical distinction between epistemic modal and ‘source of information’ evidential meanings. Nanti use of the two quotation strategies is specifically analyzed in the context of self-quotation practices in order to isolate specific aspects of their pragmatics. This analysis shows that the lexical quotative strategy expresses that the quoted party is not only the source of the content of the utterance, but is also an ‘illocutionary source’, who is committed to the interactional force of the utterance, while the grammaticalized quotative strategy does not indicate such a commitment. The functional difference between lexical and grammatical quotative strategies in Nanti is compared with differences between lexical and grammaticalized quotative and reportive strategies found in other languages, and the Nanti results are found to be consistent with cross-linguistic tendencies towards functional differentiation of lexical quotative and reportives, on the one hand, and their grammaticalized counterparts, on the other. These facts, it is argued, motivate a distinction on functional grounds between grammaticalized reportives and quotatives and their lexical counterparts, supporting the use of grammaticalization as a criterion for distinguishing evidentials proper from evidential strategies. The commitment-augmenting function of the lexical quotative construction in Nanti self-quotation is then examined in light of the commitment-diminishing function commonly attributed to quotatives and reportives (and also found in Nanti). It is argued that both types of commitment-modulating effects emerge as implicatures from the basic information and illocutionary source semantics of Nanti lexical quotatives, and from pragmatic reasoning based on whether the quoted party is first person or third person. The fact that both commitment-modulating functions of Nanti lexical quotatives are derived from semantics of lexical quotatives elements is argued to show that the distinction between information source and epistemic modal meanings, often taken to be a pivotal notional distinction in defining evidentiality as a grammatical category, is also essential to the proper analysis of the pragmatics of evidential strategies in discourse.

Pragmatics and Society, 2012

Although stress systems and tonal systems have each been objects of prolonged linguistic study, a... more Although stress systems and tonal systems have each been objects of prolonged linguistic study, and the prototypical members of each type of system are relatively well understood, prosodic systems that combine the characteristics of both stress and tone systems are less well studied, and continue to pose descriptive and theoretical challenges (Hyman 2006). The goal of this paper is to describe one such prosodic system, found in Iquito, a Zaparoan language of northern Peru, and to demonstrate that a parsimonious description of the word prosodic system of this language results from carefully distinguishing the stress and tone systems of the language and examining their interaction.

This strategy essentially puts into operation Hyman's (2009) call for property-driven approaches to word-prosodic typology in the analysis of so-called 'pitch-accent' systems. The Iquito word prosodic system consists of clearly distinguishable stress and tone systems, in which stress and tone have distinct acoustic correlates. Tonal minimal pairs exist in the language, but tone is also partially dependent on the position of primary stress. The density of tones in words is low, but the language also exhibits a requirement that each prosodic word carry at least a single high tone. If a given word exhibits no lexical tones, a high tone is assigned to the syllable bearing primary stress. The result is best described as a low-density tone system (one in which many syllables do not bear tone) that is partially dependent on metrical structure.

Iquito, a Zaparoan language of Peruvian Amazonia, marks a binary distinction between realis and i... more Iquito, a Zaparoan language of Peruvian Amazonia, marks a binary distinction between realis and irrealis clauses solely by means of a word order alternation. Realis clauses exhibit a construction in which no element intervenes between the subject and verb, while in irrealis clauses a phrasal constituent appears between the subject and verb. No free or bound morphology otherwise indicates whether an Iquito clause is realis or irrealis. Based on these facts and partially similar phenomena in other languages, this article argues that ty-pologies of inflectional exponence should be expanded to include word order as an inflectional formative.

In this article we describe and develop an optimality-theoretic (OT) analysis of foot-level (seco... more In this article we describe and develop an optimality-theoretic (OT) analysis of foot-level (secondary) and word-level (primary) stress in Nanti, a Kampa language of Peru. The distribution of stress in Nanti is sensitive to rhythmic factors, syllable quantity, vowel quality, and to whether a syllable is open or closed. The interaction of these independent variables produces a complex, multigrade stress scale married to an iterative stress system whose default preference is alternating, iambic rhythm. While each of the interacting factors in this system is familiar to phonologists, Nanti is special because the particular combination of influences and factors in Nanti contributes to a complexity of interactions that has not been documented in any other language to date.*

The following is a piece that I wrote far back in 2008 as I was finishing my dissertation and sta... more The following is a piece that I wrote far back in 2008 as I was finishing my dissertation and starting up as an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley. I was invited to write it as one of a number of commentaries for a new edition of Max Schmidt's 1917 work "Die Aruaken. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Kulturverbreitung" [The Arawak: A Contribution to the Problem of Cultural Dissemination]. The volume ended up never being published, but over the years a number of people have asked me for this piece and it has been cited in a number of works on Arawakan history and ethnography. I've decided to make it publicly available for those who may be interested.

Interface Focus, 2022

Cadernos de Etnolingüística, 2020

Journal of Historical Linguistics, 2019

Language and Linguistics Compass

Cadernos de Etnolingüística, 2019

LIAMES, 2019

Journal of Historical Linguistics, 2018

International Journal of American Linguistics, 2013

ABSTRACT

Pragmatics and Society, 2012

This chapter appears in the volume "The life cycle of language: Past, present, and future," edite... more This chapter appears in the volume "The life cycle of language: Past, present, and future," edited by Darya Kavitskaya and Alan C.L. Yu, and published by Oxford University Press.

This chapter provides the most comprehensive description possible of Aʔɨwa, a minimally documente... more This chapter provides the most comprehensive description possible of Aʔɨwa, a minimally documented and now virtually extinct linguistic isolate of Peruvian Amazonia, based on the authors’ work with two last known rememberers of the language. We clarify the relationship of the Aʔɨwa language and people to a set of names that have surfaced in the linguistic, ethnographic, and historical literature since the 18th century. In doing so, we identify a number of confusions and errors regarding the identities of ethnolinguistic groups in the relevant region, leading us to propose the use of the name Aʔɨwa as the most appropriate one for the language and its users. The bulk of the chapter consists of our description of Aʔɨwa phonology, noun phrases, bound morphology, and simple clauses, and concludes with a comparative table that includes all previously published Aʔɨwa lexical data of which we are aware, as well as the data we collected.

This chapter appears in Vol 1 of Amazonian Languages: Isolates, An International Handbook. The version available here is the authors' final version. The published version is available here: https://www.degruyter.com/serial/hskal-b/html

This chapter provides an overview of the grammar and phonology of Muniche, an almost-extinct ling... more This chapter provides an overview of the grammar and phonology of Muniche, an almost-extinct linguistic isolate historically spoken in the Huallaga River basin of central Peruvian Amazonia. Reflecting its location in the transitional zone between the Andean highlands and the Amazonian lowlands, Muniche exhibits a combination of typically Andean and typically Amazonian features. Muniche has an unusually large consonant inventory for an Amazonian language, with clear signs of convergence towards an Andean consonantal profile, and complex consonant clusters that are likewise atypical of Amazonian languages. It is a head-marking VSO language, with morphologically complex verbs that can bear causative, passive, and reciprocal derivational suffixes, as well as desiderative, irrealis, sentential mood, tense, and aspect suffixes. Subject and object person markers are enclitics, with subject markers exhibiting the unusual property of being second-position clausal enclitics. Muniche nouns are morphologically simpler than verbs, not bearing case suffixes but exhibiting noun classifiers similar to those found in many Amazonian languages.

This chapter appears in Vol 2 of Amazonian Languages: Isolates, An International Handbook. The version available here is the authors' final version. The published version is available here: https://www.degruyter.com/serial/hskal-b/html

Amazonian Languages: Language Isolates, An International Handbook, 2023

This is the authors' final version of the Introduction to the first volume of Amazonian Language:... more This is the authors' final version of the Introduction to the first volume of Amazonian Language: An International Handbook. The first two volumes focus on Language Isolates, and are available here: https://www.degruyter.com/serial/hskal-b/html

The Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management, 2022

In this chapter, we describe a methodology and workflow for developing lexical resources for unde... more In this chapter, we describe a methodology and workflow for developing lexical resources for underdocumented languages in the context of language documentation projects dedicated to one or both of the following goals: (1) to create and distribute a dictionary to a user community; and (2) to create a multipurpose extensible lexical resource that forms an integral part of a language documentation and is interdependent with other components of the project, including a text corpus and grammatical analyses. In particular, we describe a workflow that makes use of FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx), a lexical and text corpus database application, together with an XML-to-(Xe)LaTeX Python script, from which one can produce professional-quality typeset PDF files for paper or digital publications. All the software and applications we discuss are open source and/or free to obtain and use and have been stably supported for decades. In addition, we describe the methodology we have developed over more than twenty years of language documentation and description in Peruvian Amazonia that addresses concerns about both data sharing and data validity in the context of the lexicographical practicalities of documentation projects focused on underdocumented languages.

There can be little doubt that social practices and culture a↵ect language; the interesting quest... more There can be little doubt that social practices and culture a↵ect language; the interesting question is: in what concrete ways is linguistic form and structure shaped by culture, and what are the processes by which culture does so? One approach, culture-driven grammaticalization theory (Simpson 2002, Evans 2003), suggests that cultural influence on linguistic form is mediated by the development of conventionalized communicative practices that increase the frequency of particular lexical items, constructions, and pragmatic inferences in discourse, thereby putting in place a crucial pre-condition for their grammaticalization.

The goal of this chapter is to contribute to the development of culture-driven grammaticalization theory by developing an account of the cultural basis for the grammaticalization of quotative evidentials in Nanti, an Arawak language of lowland southeastern Peru. In particular, I argue that Nanti quotative evidentials grammaticalized from inflected verbs of speaking that achieved high discourse frequencies due to the emergence of communicative practices that link respectful communicative conduct towards others with the avoidance of speculation about others’ actions and internal states. As part of this communicative practice, Nantis largely restrict their discussion of others’ actions and internal states to two domains: reported speech regarding others’ actions and internal states, and actions that they witnessed themselves, which can also serve to index internal states.

Negation in Arawak Languages, 2014

The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics, 2010

Recent phylogenetic studies in historical linguistics have focused on lexical data. However, the ... more Recent phylogenetic studies in historical linguistics have focused on lexical data. However, the way that such data are coded into characters for phylogenetic analysis has been approached in different ways, without investigating how coding methods may affect the results. In this paper, we compare three different coding methods for lexical data (multistate meaning-based characters, binary root-meaning characters, and binary cognate characters) in a Bayesian framework, using data from the Tupí-Guaraní and Chapacuran language families as case studies. We show that, contrary to prior expectations, different coding methods can have a significant impact on the topology of the resulting trees.

ABSTRACT Why do languages have the categories they do? It has been argued that spatial terms in t... more ABSTRACT Why do languages have the categories they do? It has been argued that spatial terms in the world's languages reflect categories that support highly informative communication, and that this accounts for the spatial categories found across languages. However, this proposal has been tested against only nine languages, and in a limited fashion. Here, we consider two new languages: Maijɨki, an under-documented language of Peruvian Amazonia, and English. We analyze spatial data from these two new languages and the original nine, using thorough and theoretically targeted computational tests. The results support the hypothesis that spatial terms across dissimilar languages enable near-optimally informative communication, over an influential competing hypothesis.

ailla.utexas.org

Page 1. La incorporación nominal y los clasificadores verbales en el idioma Nanti (Kampa, Arawak,... more Page 1. La incorporación nominal y los clasificadores verbales en el idioma Nanti (Kampa, Arawak, Perú) ∗ Lev Michael University of Texas at Austin lmichael@mail.utexas.edu Palabras Claves: incorporación nominal, clasificadores, Arawak, Amazonıa 1 Introducción ...

The structure of verbal art and the grammar of everyday speech have been argued to be intimately ... more The structure of verbal art and the grammar of everyday speech have been argued to be intimately related by scholars from a variety of theoretical backgrounds. A major theme in this line of research is that poetic forms are generated by the artistic redeployment of linguistic resources already present in the grammar of a language (Jakobson, 1968;. This paper evaluates and explores this claim by examining the poetic structure of a particular verbal art form in relation to the grammar of the language spoken by its performers. The verbal art form I examine is karintaa, an extemporaneously composed poetic form performed by the Nantis of the Peruvian Amazon. Focusing on the phenomenon of vowel lengthening in these chants, I compare this prosodic phenomenon with the grammaticalized prosodic structure of everyday Nanti speech. To make my comparison maximally explicit, I adopt an optimality theoretic framework in which I take extemporaneous karintaa to be outputs of a canonical optimality-theoretic constraint system that serves to force inputs (which are everyday utterances) to more closely match the prosodic structure of the refrain.

Este diccionario documenta el léxico del iquito, una lengua indígena del norte de la Amazonía per... more Este diccionario documenta el léxico del iquito, una lengua indígena del norte de la Amazonía peruana. El iquito es un miembro de la familia lingüística záparo, cuyos otros miembros incluyen el andoa, el arabela y el sápara (también conocido como záparo). El iquito era hablado antiguamente en una región extensa entre los ríos Tigre y Napo, en lo que ahora es el departamento de Loreto, Perú, pero en la actualidad solo es hablado por un número reducido de ancianos de comunidades del río Pintuyacu y sus cercanías, cuatro de los cuales, Jaime Pacaya Inuma, Ema Llona Yareja, Hermenegildo Díaz Cuyasa y Ligia Inuma Inuma, contribuyeron al amplio conocimiento lingüístico, cultural e histórico que está documentado en este diccionario.

Este diccionario sirve de registro exhaustivo del léxico iquito, así como de descripción de aspectos de la cultura iquito que son relevantes para comprender los usos y los significados de las palabras iquito documentadas en este diccionario. Se ofrecen numerosos ejemplos del uso de estas palabras, junto con una descripción de sus propiedades gramaticales. También se ofrece un glosario de términos clave del castellano loretano que aparecen en las definiciones.

Dictionaria, 2021

Published in Dictionaria, an open access journal, this is essentially a digital version of Michae... more Published in Dictionaria, an open access journal, this is essentially a digital version of Michael et al. (2019), with an expanded grammar sketch and corrections of minor errors.

This dictionary documents the lexicon of Iquito, an indigenous language of northern Peruvian Amaz... more This dictionary documents the lexicon of Iquito, an indigenous language of northern Peruvian Amazonia. Iquito is a member of the Zaparoan language family, whose other members include Andoa, Arabela, and Sápara (also known as Záparo). Formerly spoken in a large region between the Tigre and Napo Rivers in what is now the departamento of Loreto, Peru, Iquito is currently spoken by a small number of elders in communities on or near the Pintuyacu River, four of whom, Jaime Pacaya Inuma, Ema Llona Yareja, Hermenegildo Díaz Cuyasa, and Ligia Inuma Inuma, contributed the broad linguistic, cultural, and historical knowledge documented in this dictionary.

This dictionary serves not only as a comprehensive record of the Iquito lexicon; it also documents the unpredictable allomorphy and grammatical features of Iquito lexemes, and describes aspects of Iquito culture relevant to understanding their use and meanings. A glossary of Loretano Spanish terms used in the definitions is also provided.

This monograph presents a detailed philological study of the oldest known texts written in Omagua... more This monograph presents a detailed philological study of the oldest known texts written in Omagua, a Tupí-Guaraní language of western Amazonia. Produced in the 17th and/or 18th centuries by Jesuit missionaries as a central component of their evangelical work in the Gobierno de Maynas, these texts include: 1) a version of the Lord's Prayer (Pater Noster); 2) a short fragment of a longer catechism; 3) a second complete catechism; and 4) a Profession of Faith. In addition, we present an analysis of brief Omagua passages found in the diary of Manuel Uriarte, a Jesuit missionary active among the Omaguas during the mid-18th century. Each text is presented in a detailed interlinear format that allows the reader to follow, from the original lines of each text, analytical decisions regarding the successive steps of resegmentation of word boundaries, phonemicization, morphological segmentation and glossing, and generation of free translations. Each text is footnoted extensively with bibliographic and interpretive annotations. In addition to philological analyses of each text, we
present a substantial grammatical sketch of Old Omagua (i.e., 17th- and/or 18th-century Omagua) as attested in these texts, drawing comparisons where helpful with modern Omagua, its sister language Kokama, Proto-Omagua-Kokama, and colonial-era Tupinambá, the next most closely related language. This grammatical sketch not only serves as the basis for insights into how Omagua has evolved since the early colonial period, and helps to clarify the relationship of Omagua and Kokama to other Tupí-Guaraní languages (a subject of much controversy), but also allows the reader to critically evaluate the interlinearized and annotated ecclesiastical texts presented in the volume. We conclude by historically contextualizing the production and
circulation of Omagua ecclesiastical texts, summarizing Jesuit
engagement with the linguistic diversity of the Gobierno de Maynas, and discussing the strategic role played by successively reworked and re-edited ecclesiastical texts in surmounting the evangelical challenges posed by this diversity. We further show how a close examination of the texts themselves yields additional insights into Jesuit linguistic and text development practices.

Final authors'/editors' version; "Negation in Arawak Languages" presents detailed descriptions of... more Final authors'/editors' version; "Negation in Arawak Languages" presents detailed descriptions of negation constructions in nine Arawak languages (Apurinã, Garifuna, Kurripako, Lokono, Mojeño Trinitario, Nanti, Paresi, Tariana, and Wauja), as well as an overview of negation in this major language family. Functional-typological in orientation, each descriptive chapter in the volume is based on fieldwork by authors in the communities in which the languages are spoken. Chapters describe standard negation, prohibitives, existential negation, negative indefinites, and free negation, as well as language-specific negation phenomena such as morphological privatives, the interaction of negation with verbal inflectional categories, and negation in clause-linking constructions.

A collection of Iquito personal and historical narratives with Iquito community members in mind a... more A collection of Iquito personal and historical narratives with Iquito community members in mind as the principal audience. At the request of community members, the collection is tri-lingual in Iquito, local Spanish (all translations are from Iquito elders), and English.

Iquito-Spanish dictionary designed for use in Iquito community schools

A community-oriented bilingual dictionary of Máíjɨ̀kì [ore] (Western Tukanoan) prepared by the P... more A community-oriented bilingual dictionary of Máíjɨ̀kì [ore] (Western Tukanoan) prepared by the Projecto Máíjɨ̀kì (2013)

A community-oriented pedagogical grammatical sketch of Muniche [myr] produced by the Proyecto de ... more A community-oriented pedagogical grammatical sketch of Muniche [myr] produced by the Proyecto de Documentación del Idioma Muniche

A community-oriented dictionary of Muniche [myr] produced by the Proyecto de Documentación del Id... more A community-oriented dictionary of Muniche [myr] produced by the Proyecto de Documentación del Idioma Muniche in 2009

Spelling primer for use in Muniche [myr] language revitalization activities produced by the Proye... more Spelling primer for use in Muniche [myr] language revitalization activities produced by the Proyecto de Documentación del Idioma Muniche

This is a 1150-page corpus of 170 morphologically parsed and glossed texts written by two Matsige... more This is a 1150-page corpus of 170 morphologically parsed and glossed texts written by two Matsigenka authors, Haroldo Vargas Pereira and José Vargas Pereira, and compiled, parsed, and glossed by Christine Beier, Lev Michael, and Zachary O'Hagan. Morpheme glosses are in English and the free translations are the original Spanish ones provided by the authors. The corpus includes traditional narratives, oral histories, personal histories, and auto-ethnographic texts.

The Ucayali River basin and its immediate vicinity is home to two branches of the Arawakan family... more The Ucayali River basin and its immediate vicinity is home to two branches of the Arawakan family, the Nihagantsi branch (comprised of Asháninka, Ashéninka, Caquinte, Matsigenka, Nanti, and Nomatsigenga) and the Western Maipuran branch (comprised of Chamicuro, Morike, and Yanesha'), as well as Yine, a member of the Purús branch (which additionally includes Apurinã and Iñapari). In this talk we provide a model of how Arawakan languages entered the Ucayali River basin, diversified, and subsequently reached their modern locations, based: 1) on a phylogenetic analysis of the genealogical relationships among these languages; and 2) an application of Linguistic Migration Theory, a parsimony-based abductive method for mapping linguistic genealogical trees to geographical distributions.

Tone melodies have played an important role in key developments in phonological theory, stimulati... more Tone melodies have played an important role in key developments in phonological theory, stimulating the development of Autosegmental Phonology (e.g., Leben 1973, Goldsmith 1976, Hyman 1987) and Q-Theory (Shih & Inkelas 2019). In this talk, we focus on tone in Iquito, a Zaparoan language of Peruvian Amazonia, and argue that the Iquito tone system (see, e.g., Hyman & Leben 2021) provides evidence for a novel claim about the structure of tone melodies while showing the value of an old but somewhat neglected insight about tone melodies.

Beginning with the older idea, we show that Iquito provides strong evidence that at least some tone melodies are tonemes (Beach 1923, Welmers 1959), that is to say, multi-tone phonological constituents that form the basis of tonological contrasts which are not reducible to sequences of independent tones. We argue that, although Iquito exhibits a /H, L, ø/ tone inventory in terms of tones assigned to tone-bearing units (moraic TBUs), the actual tonological contrast in this language is a privative one that contrasts a single trimoraic melody with its absence, leading to a reconceptualized /HLL, ø/ inventory.

Turning to the novel claim, we demonstrate that Iquito tone melodies exhibit a head-dependent structure. This structure is evident in two ways; first, melodies can survive the deletion of their dependent tones, but not the deletion of their head tone; and second, the head tones of melodies, but not their dependents, are visible to each other for the purposes of evaluating Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) violations.

These are slides for Day 1 of a mini-course on lexicography for little-documented languages that ... more These are slides for Day 1 of a mini-course on lexicography for little-documented languages that we gave at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú

These are slides for Day 2 of a mini-course on lexicography for little-documented languages that ... more These are slides for Day 2 of a mini-course on lexicography for little-documented languages that we gave at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú

Beier et al. (2011) presents a detailed description of the expression of reality status in Iquito... more Beier et al. (2011) presents a detailed description of the expression of reality status in Iquito [iqu], a highly-endangered Zaparoan language of Peruvian Amazonia. That paper claims that Iquito "marks a binary distinction between realis and irrealis clauses solely by means of a word order alternation." (Beier et al. 2011:65) Based on more recent fieldwork, in this talk we expand the description of this phenomenon and show that reality status in these types of clauses is in fact multiply exponed by a grammatical (constructional) tonal melody and a pronominal alternation in addition to the previously described word order alternation.

Using data from Matsigenka (Arawakan, Peru), this talk argues that the concept of 'path' used in ... more Using data from Matsigenka (Arawakan, Peru), this talk argues that the concept of 'path' used in the analysis of directionals and other path-denoting grammatical elements should be decomposed into two components: path geometry and path viewpoint. It is argued that the relationship between path viewpoint and path geometry strongly resembles that between Topic Time and Situation Time in aspectual categories, allowing us to see directionals as the spatio-temporal analogues of aspects.

This talk describes the use of principal component analysis (PCA) to identify large scale pattern... more This talk describes the use of principal component analysis (PCA) to identify large scale patterns, both areal and genetic, in a dataset of phonological inventories of South America. In addition, a set of major phonological inventory types are identified for the continent.

Overview of Greater Amazonia as region, its linguistic diversity, major linguistic families, and ... more Overview of Greater Amazonia as region, its linguistic diversity, major linguistic families, and some of their most salient features

These are slides for a 'master class' on evidentiality given at ICLDC 4. Basic analytical distinc... more These are slides for a 'master class' on evidentiality given at ICLDC 4. Basic analytical distinctions involving evidentiality and conceptually adjacent categories like epistemic modality and mirativity are presented, and both text-based and elicitation-based methods for the description and documentation of evidentiality are discussed.

Overview of distribution, classification, and linguistic features of languages of the Arawakan fa... more Overview of distribution, classification, and linguistic features of languages of the Arawakan family

Overview of several grammatical phenomena common in Amazonian languages: noun classifier, directi... more Overview of several grammatical phenomena common in Amazonian languages: noun classifier, directional and associated motion, and reality status systems

Overview of linguistic areality and language contact in Greater Amazonia

... por Catherine Clark, Lev Michael, y Christine Beier Un informe de la ONG Proyecto de Apoyo Ca... more ... por Catherine Clark, Lev Michael, y Christine Beier Un informe de la ONG Proyecto de Apoyo Cabeceras Marzo 2005 Cabeceras Aid Project, www.cabeceras.org 1. Introducción 3 1.1 Tema y objetivo del informe 3 1.2 Trabajo de campo y realización del informe 3 ...

El propósito de este informe es proporcionar datos pertinentes a varios temas implicados en el as... more El propósito de este informe es proporcionar datos pertinentes a varios temas implicados en el asunto de la tenencia de tierra en la zona del alto Río Camisea, donde se encuentran las dos comunidades Nantis de Montetoni y Malanksiari. Los temas tratados por este informe incluyen: 1) el uso de tierra y recursos por los habitantes de Montetoni y Malanksiari; 2) el contexto político pertinente al asunto de titulación en esta comunidades; y 3) aspectos del proceso consultorio necesario para efectar cualquier tipo de titulación.

We are pleased to announce the new issue of Cadernos de Etnolingüística, which is now being publi... more We are pleased to announce the new issue of Cadernos de Etnolingüística, which is now being published in a biannual journal format. This issue's contents include:

Artigos • Artículos • Articles

Ashéninka y asháninka: ¿de cuántas lenguas hablamos? (Toni Pedrós)

A New Approach to the Reconstitution of the Pronunciation of Timote-Cuica (Venezuelan Andes) (Matthias Urban)

The Pijao of Natagaima: Post-Linguicide Indigenous Identity and Language (Joshua James Zwisler)

Resenhas • Reseñas • Reviews

Bosquejo gramatical de la lengua iskonawa, Roberto Zariquiey (Alonso Vásquez Aguilar)

El Uro de la bahía de Puno, Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino (Roberto Zariquiey)

Cadernos de Etnolingüística is an open access journal that publishes articles on all aspects of the indigenous languages of South America. Manuscripts may be submitted and published in Portuguese, Spanish, or English. Current and previous issues of the journal, as well as instructions for preparation and submission of manuscripts are available on Cadernos de Etnolingüística's webpage: http://www.etnolinguistica.org/cadernos:home

Any questions about the journal, including submissions, can be directed to the editors (Aline da Cruz, Lev Michael, and Roberto Zariquiey) at etnocadernos@gmail.com.

Complex nasal segments (e.g. [mb], [nd], and [ŋɡ]) and nasal harmony are among the most prominent... more Complex nasal segments (e.g. [mb], [nd], and [ŋɡ]) and nasal harmony are among the most prominent topics in lowland South American phonology (Storto & Demolin 2012), with the Tupí-Guaraní (TG) family being one of the major genetic groupings that exhibit these phenomena. Despite the ubiquity of these phenomena in TG languages, however, works on this family have not reached consensus on how to analyze them, with similar systems of nasality-related phenomena receiving starkly different analyses. This talk presents a typological and analytical synthesis of nasal harmony phenomena in TG, based on a comprehensive review of works on this phenomenon in the languages of the family. First, we present a typological overview of nasal harmony in the family, distinguishing languages that exhibit the phenomenon from those that do not. Second, we review the major types of analyses presented in discussions of nasal harmony in the TG literature, namely 1) the presence of a [+nasal] prosodic feature that attaches to the phonological word (e.g., Gregores & Suárez 1967); 2) linear leftward spreading from a [+nasal] trigger to the left edge of a relevant morphophonological domain (e.g., Cardoso 2009); and 3) non-local leftward spreading of a nasal feature from a [+nasal] vowel (Thomas 2014). We provide a unified framework for analyzing nasal harmony in the TG family based on a unified treatment of nasal segments. Specifically, we argue that nasality-related phonological processes in TG languages must be separated into two types: (1) segmental nasality, which has strictly local coarticulatory effects on immediately adjacent segments, and (2) nasal harmony, which has long-distance assimilatory effects on a string of segments contained inside a given morphophonological domain (e.g., a phonological word).