A Study of Verbs in Southern Amazonian Bakairi (original) (raw)
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Defying the Norm of the Constituent Order: A Study of Bakairi, a Southern Amazonian Language
Lingua, 2014
Since the 1960s, a linguistic assumption has been widely held that once the ‘basic’ constituent order of the subject and object in relation to the verb is identified and combined with other factors (such as syntactic alignment and verb inflection), it is possible to typologize a given language. This idea became widely held with the work of Joseph Greenberg (1963), when numerous scholars joined this research field to create what is known today as the Greenbergian typology. Of the six possible permutations of the A1 & O & V, Greenberg found that only three core constituent orders of the verbal arguments were predominant in the world’s languages: AOV, AVO and VAO.2 Until 1975, it was believed that the norm for the world’s languages fell into one of these three abovementioned ‘implicational universals,’ few languages employed OAV and VOA, and no language with the basic constituent order of OVA existed in the world. Derbyshire (1979) together with Geoffrey Pullum (Derbyshire 1981) challenged this assertion. For over a decade since the early 1960s, Derbyshire had carefully studied Hixkaryana, a Carib language that defied these implicational universals. His study became the first documentation of an OVA language and it demonstrated that one of the benefits of investigating small or endangered languages was the discovery of previously unknown linguistic phenomena. This paper hereby will shed some light on another language that is also object-initial and agent/subject-final, the Bakairi language, one of the five Cariban languages with the OVA linearization in the Amazon River basin.
Serial verb constructions in Amazonian languages
Serial verb constructions are a sequence of verbs which act together as a single predicate without any over marker of coordination, subordination or syntactic dependency of any sort. Serial verb constructions can be symmetrical, consisting of two or more verbs each chosen from a semantically and grammatically unrestricted class. Or they may be asymmetrical, and include a verb from a grammatically or semantically restricted class. Serial verbs can form one or more than one grammatical word. We focus on the distribution of asymmetrical and symmetrical serial verb constructions of single-word and of multi-word types in the languages of Lowland Amazonia, and discuss their functions, meanings, and origins.
Blended grammar: Kumandene Tariana of northwest Amazonia
Abstract: Kumandene Tariana, a North Arawak language, spoken by about 40 people in the community of Santa Terezinha on the Iauari river (tributary of the Vaupés River, not far from the Upper Rio Negro, a major tributary of the Amazon), can be considered a new blended language. The Kumandene Tariana moved to their present location from the middle Vaupés about two generations ago, escaping pressure from the Catholic missionaries. The Kumandene Tariana intermarry with the Baniwa Hohôdene, speakers of a closely related language. This agrees with the principle of 'linguistic exogamy' common to most indigenous people within the Vaupés River Basin linguistic area. Baniwa is the majority language in the community, and Kumandene Tariana is endangered. The only other extant variety of Tariana is the Wamiarikune Tariana dialect (for which there is a grammar and a dictionary, by the present author) which has undergone strong influence from Tucano, the major language of the region. As a result of their divergent development and different substrata, Kumandene Tariana and Wamiarikune Tariana are not mutually intelligible. Over the past fifty years, speakers of Kumandene Tariana have acquired numerous Baniwa-like features in the grammar and lexicon. The extent of Baniwa impact on Kumandene Tariana varies depending on the speaker, and on the audience. Kumandene Tariana shares some similarities with other 'blended', or 'merged' languages — including Surzhyk (a combination or Russian and Ukrainian), Trasjanka (a mixture of Russian and Belorussian), and Portunhol (a merger of Spanish and Portuguese). The influence of Baniwa is particularly instructive in the domain of verbal categories — negation, tense, aspect, and evidentiality on which we concentrate in this presentation.
A Grammar of Murui (Bue): A Witotoan language of Northwest Amazonia
(this version has been updated on June 13, 2018) This is the first detailed description of Murui (Bue variety of ‘Witoto’), a hitherto little-documented Witotoan language spoken by about 2,000 people in the Colombian and Peruvian areas of the Amazon Basin. The thesis is written following the latest theoretical requirements of modern descriptive linguistics (Dixon’s Basic Linguistic Theory). It uses extensive immersion fieldwork and participant observation as methodological techniques in the best tradition of descriptive linguistic work. Collected during several fieldtrips to the Murui communities located between the Putumayo and Caquetá rivers in Colombia (El Encanto, Tercera India, San Rafael, and San José) between 2013 and 2016, the linguistic data consists of an extensive corpus of texts in a variety of genres (including songs, folk tales, myths, life story narratives, narratives of traditional customs and practices, and everyday conversations), as well as field notes. In addition to the language description and analysis, the grammar also draws attention to the typological features of Murui, and sheds new light on the linguistic variation among the Witotoan languages. It is a valuable resource for further research on the linguistic affiliation of the Witotoan language family in South America. The grammar presents analyses of the phonology, morphology and syntax of the Murui language. The thesis is divided into 13 robust chapters covering specific relevant topics. These chapters are: (1) The Murui language and its speakers (sociolinguistic and genealogical information, overview of earlier work), (2) Phonology (a detailed treatment of the Murui sound system with all its complexity), (3) Word classes (an overview of open and closed word classes and their main characteristics), (4) Noun structure and classifiers (shows the central role of classifiers and repeaters in the structure of nouns and of the language in general), (5) Possession and number (on possessive constructions and the ability of nouns to be possessed), (6) Grammatical relations (the central topic in every language description), (7) Predicate structure, non-spatial, and spatial setting (a detailed presentation of predicate structure and the main categories in verbal morphology: tense, aspect, modality, evidentiality, and spatial distinctions), (8) Valency-changing mechanisms (the verbal derivational categories passive, causative, reflexive and reciprocal), (9) Adjectives and comparative constructions (on adjectives and strategies of comparison), (10) Negation (types of negation, clausal and non-clausal), (11) Commands and questions (imperatives and command strategies, types of questions), (12) Sentence types and clause linking (the structure of complex sentences, types of independent clauses), (13) Discourse organization (clause linkage, structure of narratives, focus, the influence of Spanish). Additionally, there is an elaborate list of relevant literature references, and a sample of five fully analysed illustrative texts with glosses and translation, including the origin story of the Murui people.
This dissertation provides a description of the Chácobo language, a southern Pano language spoken by approximately 1200 people who live close to or on the Geneshuaya, Ivon, Benicito and Yata rivers in the northern Bolivian Amazon. The grammatical description emerges out of an ethnographically based documentation project of the language. Chapter 1 contains an overview of the cultural context in which the Chácobo language is embedded and a brief ethnohistory of the Chácobo people. I also discuss the general methodology of the dissertation touching specifically on issues related to data collection. Chapter 2 introduces the phonology of the language focusing on the categories necessary for its description. Chapter 3 provides a discussion of morphosyntactic structures and relations. This chapter provides a discussion of how head-dependent relations and the general distinction between morphology and syntax are understood throughout the dissertation. Parts of speech classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) are also defined and motivated based on semantic and formal criteria. Chapter 4 describes predication and its relationship to clause-typing. Chapter 5 is concerned with constituency which refers to hierarchical structures motivated through distributional properties and relations and the relative degree of contiguity between linguistic categories. Chapter 6 provides an extensive discussion of morphophonology and its relation to constituency. Chapter 7 and 8 are concerned with the language’s alignment and valence-adjusting systems. The next five chapters provide a description of the functional domains relevant to the verbal domain including; Tense (Chapter 9); Temporal distance (Chapter 10); Aspect (Chapter 11); Associated Motion (Chapter 12); Perspective (Chapter 13). The last two Chapters focus on categories in the nominal domain. Chapter 14 provides a description of noun compounding, adjectives and possession. Chapter 15 provides a description of number, quantification and deixis inside and outside the nominal domain.
Reconstructing the category of 'associated motion' in Tacanan languages (Amazonian Bolivia and Peru)
John Benjamins, 2013
This paper deals with the diachrony of the associated motion (AM) category in the Tacanan languages of the Amazonian lowlands of Bolivia and Peru. The category of AM consists of grammatical markers that attach to non-motion verbs and specify that the verb action (V) occurs against the background of a motion event (e.g., ‘go and V’, ‘V while going’, etc.). The AM systems of Tacanan languages are noteworthy for their remarkably high degree of complexity, reaching levels rarely found in languages of other parts of the word. This raises several questions, one of which is how they evolved historically. In this paper, I gather for the first time the information available on the AM systems of the five Tacanan languages (Araona, Cavineña, Ese Ejja, Reyesano and Tacana) and attempt to reconstruct their past. I first argue that between one and four AM markers can be reconstructed in Proto-Tacanan. Secondly, I argue that several AM markers that are not reconstructible have developed recently out of independent verbs of motion and I make the hypothesis that these have been directly copied into already well established AM paradigms.