Rosa Vallejos-Yopán

University of New Mexico | UNM · Department of Linguistics

Este estudio investiga las motivaciones cognitivas y funcionales detrás del surgimiento de una construcción posesiva innovadora en el español de la Amazonía peruana. En esta variedad, el núcleo de un sintagma nominal no concuerda necesariamente en número con su modificador, cuando este es un pronombre posesivo. Así, sintagmas del tipo sus canoa son...

This study analyzes the instantiation of objects in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish (PAS) discourse in two communities with distinct linguistic contexts. We examine the impact of two social variables (gender and place) and nine linguistic variables (transitivity, animacy, definiteness, anaphora function, anaphora expression, cataphora function, cataphor...

This study has two aims. First, it lays out the synchronic patterning of four constructions that express static location in Secoya (Tukanoan). Each construction licenses different semantic verb types: topological verbs, postural verbs, an existential verb, and a copula. Second, this study explores the different construals encoded by these construct...

Some linguistic structures found in Amazonian Spanish tend to be associated by and large with a rural variety spoken by people frequently depicted as indigenous. However, direct observations indicate that most of these features are pervasive among speakers across the social spectrum. What, then, are the parameters of linguistic variation in Peruvia...

Cross-linguistically, implicit purposive subjects are controlled to an overwhelmingly degree by the matrix subjects (Schmidtke-Bode 2009:56). In fact, little evidence has been found of constructions in which main and dependent events are not performed by the same entity, and no evidence about constructions in which the performer of the main event d...

In Amazonian Spanish, este has two main functions: demonstrative and filler. Filler- este , which originally evolved from demonstrative- este , serves to deal with word-formulation delays during spontaneous speech production. Analyses of conversations reveal that este primarily functions as a filler: 70% of the tokens of este are either fillers ser...

This study examines the role of two indigenous languages in higher education in the Amazon of Peru. It looks at efforts to implement Kukama and Kichwa as key components in the teacher training model developed by the Programa de Formación de Maestros Bilingües de la Amazonía Peruana (henceforth FORMABIAP for its initials in Spanish). At present, Kuk...

This study explores the implementation of critical thinking via metacognition in linguistics courses. It employs surveys to examine strategies used by students in two courses, Morphosyntax and Field Methods, devoted to the development of analytical skills in linguistics. We hypothesized that the application of metacognition surveys would enhance st...

This paper aims to demonstrate two things. First, Secoya (Tukanoan) has gender markers and shape classifiers. However, unlike other Tukanoan languages, Secoya does not display grammatical agreement, either between the head noun and its modifiers within a noun phrase or between the predicate and its arguments within a clause. Gender markers and shap...

In this paper we present Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR), a meaning representation designed to annotate the semantic content of a text. UMR is primarily based on Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), an annotation framework initially designed for English, but also draws from other meaning representations. UMR extends AMR to other languages, p...

One of the most striking facts about the languages of the world is that they are both similar and unique at the same time. The Functional-Typological approach explains this fact in terms of both the adaptive motivation of languages and their typological diversity. Functionalism starts with the fundamental assumption that languages are the way they...

The present volume is a collection of 13 chapters selected from 32 presentations at a special session on nonverbal predication at the international conference Amazônicas V, that took place in Belem, Brazil, in May 2014. ¹ Following this introductory chapter, the papers are primarily descriptive and historical, offering abundant data generally from...

This study examines the correlations between possessive semantic relations and construction types in Kukama-Kukamiria (Amazon of Peru). The language does not have lexical verbs such as 'have', 'belong,' or a copula to predicate ownership. Yet possession can be inferred from other constructions, including: a predicate nominal construction with two j...

In this talk we provide a phonetically grounded, usage-based account of word-level prosody in Kukama-Kukamiria (KK), a language of the Peruvian Amazon. We first examine KK lexical stress and show that in addition to a primary stress on the penultimate syllable (Vallejos 2016), KK shows a co-existing pattern of secondary stress assignment that lends...

This study examines number agreement within the noun phrase in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish (PAS), and shows evidence for the existence of a previously undocumented morphosyntactic feature. In PAS, the possessed noun does not necessarily agree in number with the possessor pronoun, yielding the following possibilities: singular concord - su canoa; plu...

This book offers a comprehensive description of Kukama-Kukamiria, spoken by about 1000 elders in the Peruvian Amazon. The empirical basis for the grammar is fifteen years of fieldwork, including text data from 36 fluent speakers. Seventeen chapters deal with phonology, morphology, syntax and discourse phenomena. Salient typological features include...

Este documento contiene aproximadamente 2400 entradas léxicas y gramaticales. Cada entrada ofrece abundante información con la finalidad de acercar a nuestros lectores al mundo de los kukama-kukamiria. Este diccionario documenta muchos procesos y prácticas socio-culturales, y recoge buena parte del sofisticado conocimiento que poseen sobre su entor...

El presente artículo ofrece un análisis exhaustivo del sistema de género en kukama-kukamiria, lengua hablada en la Amazonía de Perú. La lengua en estudio no posee género gramatical sino un sistema que indexicaliza el género del hablante. Esta indexicalización se manifiesta de manera tangencial a través de la sustitución fonológica, pero esencialmen...

This paper highlights the role of speech community members on a series of interconnected projects to document, study and maintain Kokama, a deeply endangered language from the Peruvian Amazon. The remaining fluent speakers of the language are mostly older than 60 years of age, are spread out across various small villages, and speak the language in...

The goal of this study is twofold: (i) it provides the first phonological account of a variety of Secoya (Western Tucanoan) spoken in villages located along the tributaries of the Putumayo river, in Peru; (ii) it contributes new data and analysis to advance comparative studies within the Tucanoan family towards the reconstruction of Proto-Tucanoan....

In Kokama-Kokamilla (KK), ditransitive constructions — i.e. syntactic units that profile three participants and contain two non-subject arguments — do not exist as a distinct type relative to transitives. KK shows both indirective and secundative alignment types (Haspelmath 2004, Dryer 1986, 2006), but no formal or behavioral evidence for a second...

Focus subtypes can be characterized according to scope and pragmatic (e.g., [non]-contrastive) information. While the existence of strategies dedicated to code scope seems clear, the existence of grammar dedicated to pragmatic contrast is in dispute (Lambrecht 1994 and Myhill and Xing 1996). Some models propose that contrast is expressed in sentenc...