A Grammar of Tariana, From Northwest Amazonia (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
The Tariana of north-west Amazonia
The integration of language and society: a cross-linguistic typology. edited by Aikhenvald, Dixon and Jarkey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021
Tariana is an Arawak language spoken by about a hundred people in the Vaupés River Basin linguistic area in Brazil. A number of grammatical features reflect specific traits of the ways the people live. Manipulating genders correlates with the status of women: a respected and knowledgeable woman can be referred to with nonfeminine gender, as if 'promoted' to manhood. Classifiers occur in multiple environments, including number words, demonstratives, adjectives, and possessive constructions. Classifiers with specific semantics reflect riverine environment, taxonomic categorization of plants, and means of subsistence. Five evidentials obligatorily mark information source. Their use correlates with the requirement to be precise in stating how one knows things, and in the types of access to information. Nonvisual evidentials are used in talking about the feelings, physical states and uncontrolled actions of oneself and one’s core family members. Speakers are aware of the meanings and the uses of evidential, and are prepared to discuss and explain them. Evidentials are sensitive to technological changes, as they adjust to new ways of acquiring information. Evidentials and classifiers are shared across the multilingual area of the Vaupés River Basin. Contact between speakers of adjacent languages appear to have shaped the speakers’ interaction patterns and the associated language features. In contrast, gender manipulation is being lost by younger speakers, as the status of women undergoes transformations.
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.
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.
How to copy your neighbors’ ways: A cross-generational perspective on nominalizations in Tariana
STUF - Language Typology and Universals, 2018
Tariana, an endangered Arawak language of north-western Amazonia (Brazil), has a number of strategies for nominalizing verbs. These include noun classifiers as word-class changing derivational markers, in addition a number of nominalizing suffixes. Nominalizations are a subclass of nouns, with their own set of special properties. As a consequence of areal diffusion from the neighboring and unrelated East-Tucanoan languages, Tariana nominalizations come to be used as complementation and relativization strategies. This is especially so for innovative speakers of Tariana who use Tucano on a daily basis, and whose language bears a strong imprint of Tucano, the main language of the region.