The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia
Abstract
This is the first account of Jarawara, a Southern Amazonia language of great complexity and unusual interest, and now spoken by less than two hundred people. It has only two open lexical classes, noun and verb, and a closed adjective class with fourteen members which can only modify a noun. Verbs have a complex structure with three prefix and some twenty-five suffix slots. There is an eleven-term tense-modal system with an evidentiality contrast (eyewitness/non-eyewitness) in the three past tenses. Of the two genders, feminine and masculine, feminine is unmarked. There are at least eight types of subordinate clause constructions, including complement clauses, relative clauses, coreferential dependent clauses, and ‘when’, ‘if’, ‘due to the lack of’ and ‘because of’ clauses.There are only eleven consonants and four vowels but an extensive set of ordered phonological rules of lenition, vowel assimilation and unstressed syllable omission. There are four imperative inflections (with different meanings) and three explicit interrogative suffixes within the mood system. The book is entirely based on field work by the authors.
... Jarawara. Jarawara is an Arawan language spoken in the Amazon, in the country of Brazil (Dixon 2004). The description in this subsection is based on work by Robert M. W. Dixon (Dixon 2000), especially the grammar (Dixon 2004) that was composed with the aid of Alan Vogel; the recent publication of Vogel 2022 was consulted as well. ...
... Jarawara is an Arawan language spoken in the Amazon, in the country of Brazil (Dixon 2004). The description in this subsection is based on work by Robert M. W. Dixon (Dixon 2000), especially the grammar (Dixon 2004) that was composed with the aid of Alan Vogel; the recent publication of Vogel 2022 was consulted as well. I am also grateful to Alan Vogel (p.c.) for discussion. ...
... (53) a. otaa mano b. mee mani 1pl.excl arm.m 3pl arm.f 'our arms' 'their arms' (Dixon 2004:315) Though I depart from Dixon's (2004) analysis, I argue that gender is indeed determined by ipossession in the language: in particular, all ipossessable nouns are consistently feminine (the unmarked gender in the language), both when the noun is ipossessed and when it is not. This is consistent with Dixon's claim that all nouns that can be ipossessed are feminine (2004:80, 285), with only one exception; I discuss this below. ...
The grammatical gender of a noun can be sensitive to a number of different factors, including the noun’s lexical semantics, nominalizing morphology, or arbitrary requirements imposed by particular roots (e.g. Corbett 1991, Kramer 2020), though the limits on possible factors are not currently understood, with some work proposing that a noun’s gender can even be valued ‘at a distance’ via agreement with other nominals. The current study explores the understudied phenomenon of gender-possession interactions (Evans 1994), investigating whether being possessed, or being possessable, can have an impact on which gender a noun is assigned. Evidence is provided from four unrelated languages supporting the existence of such interactions. Strikingly, however, these interactions are restricted to inalienable possession; no such interactions have been identified for alienable possession. I propose that this falls out from a general gender locality hypothesis (GLH), which restricts the domain of gender assignment within a phrase n P. The GLH captures the gender asymmetry between ‘local’, inalienable possessors introduced within n P and ‘nonlocal’, alienable possessors introduced outside of n P, for example, in a phrase PossP (Alexiadou 2003, Myler 2016). The GLH also makes further predictions for other features with respect to what may or may not factor into gender assignment, severely restricting or outright prohibiting gender-assignment effects from number, definiteness, and case. Broadly, the work expands our understanding of which types of elements can be relevant to gender assignment and sheds light on underexplored gender-, possession-, and agreement-related phenomena.
... La lengua jarawara, 23 al igual que el aimara, utiliza SD de amplios sentidos que se unen a verbos flexivos o a auxiliares de verbos no flexivos. Dixon (2004) los separa en dos grupos: sufijos de localización y dirección y sufijos de movimiento y dirección. ...
... El jarawara es una lengua amazónica de la familia arawá hablada al oeste de la ciudad de Lábrea, en el estado brasileño de Amazonas. Sus coordenadas aproximadas son 7°24' de latitud sur y 65°0' de longitud oeste(Dixon 2004). ...
Basado en la teoría de Talmy, acerca de las categorías semánticas en eventos de movimiento, se ha delimitado el concepto de sufijos direccionales en veintiséis lenguas andinas y amazónicas. Se ha determinado, por lo tanto, que los sufijos direccionales son morfemas que codifican la categoría semántica de «trayectoria» en los verbos de movimiento. Partiendo desde el aimara, que registra una gran variedad de sufijos direccionales, se encontró que diversas lenguas de la región también emplean estos sufijos incrustados en las casillas preflexivas de la estructura verbal. Su presencia en una lengua no depende de factores geográficos debido a que se encuentran hasta en las tierras bajas del Vaupés (wanano) y del Purús (jarawara); mientras que, en el quechua moderno y el chipaya, a pesar de ser lenguas de tierras altas como el aimara, los sufijos direccionales no se mantienen y tienden a caducar. Por otro lado, el examen comparativo de la presencia de sufijos direccionales, entre las veintiséis lenguas estudiadas, nos indica cómo han evolucionado a través del tiempo; en un caso, cómo llegan a convertirse en sufijos y, en otro, cómo se extinguen y dejan vestigio en sufijos aspectuales o como segmento fosilizado en una raíz.
... The different choices of Topic are not active-passive but simply different ways of profiling the event (Foley and Van Valin 1984, §4.3); there is no change in transitivity or markedness, and there is no "basic" form; all are derived, though frequency counts have shown a strong preference for the use of Undergoer Topic constructions (Adricula 2023), though it depends on genre (Longacre 1996). This system is similar to the choice of A construction vs. O construction in Jarawara (Dixon 2000(Dixon , 2004 depending on what is considered the topic of the clause, though Tagalog allows for many more choices for the Topic than Jarawara: actor Topic (8), patient Topic (9), conveyance Topic (a theme, a benefactive, or an instrument) (10), or locative Topic (a goal, source, or stative (essive) locative argument) (11). These are sometimes talked about as different symmetrical voices, but they are actually derivations, not inflections (Himmelmann 2004(Himmelmann , 2005(Himmelmann , 2008, and some of the same affixes often appear on referential phrases involving object words, not just on predicates or action words, e.g., basura 'garbage', basurahan 'garbage bin, garbage truck', using the same Locative-Forming Suffix (LFS) that we saw in the predicates of examples (6), (7), and (11). ...
This article responds to a conference call for papers that makes universalist assumptions about clause structures, assuming all languages in the world basically follow the same organizing principles in terms of clause structure, argument structure, and alignment. The article presents data from Tagalog to show how different a language can be from the assumed universal organizing principles to make the point that by imposing an Indo-European framework on non-Indo-European languages, we are overlooking the true diversity of language forms found in the world’s languages.
... A case that is remarkably similar to the one in Fwe above comes from Jarawara (Arawan; jaa; Dixon 2004), and a description of the relevant markers within the present analytical framework can be found in Zingler (2020: 213-216). Meanwhile, not a single definiteness, case, or tense marker in Zingler (2020) shows the kind of behavior with regard to reduplication that the Fwe and Jarawara indexes do. ...
This paper argues that indexation markers (i.e., argument-indexing agreement markers and/or pronouns) show a wider range of formal mismatches across languages than the exponents of other inflectional categories. These mismatches are defined in terms of mixed behavior with respect to different criteria of wordhood. The mismatches that the indexation markers (or “indexes”) show include extrametricality with respect to reduplication and “mobility” in that they can occur in different slots of otherwise identical word forms. Other indexes can freely occur on either member of a phrase-level construction or behave like full-fledged affixes in one context but like full-fledged words in another. The claim that the range of these traits is extraordinary is based on a larger project, (Zingler, Tim. 2020. Wordhood issues: Typology and grammaticalization . Albuquerque: University of New Mexico PhD dissertation), which in addition to indexes investigates mismatches among case, definiteness, and tense markers. The explanations offered for this behavior primarily rely on the manner in which reference is established in discourse and on the different diachronic pathways for which these usage patterns pave the way. Another major conclusion is that the indexes described here constitute a formally heterogeneous set that cannot be easily subsumed under the label of “clitics.”
... Some have interesting neutralizations. The verb for 'be hanging from a hook, lie in a hammock' has the same form (-wina-) for a singular and plural subject, but a different form (-wata-) for a dual subject (see Dixon 2004: 544, also for a possible motivation). Then the verbs for 'sit' and 'stand' have different forms for singular (-ita-and -wa(a)-, respectively); however, their semantics is neutralized for dual and plural subject. ...
This chapter offers a typological overview of the number category in the indigenous languages of South America (SA). The focus is placed on number in independent personal pronouns and on nouns, as well as on verbal number. The discussion is centered around tendencies and patterns that SA languages show in number marking in the (pro)nominal and verbal domains. Whenever relevant, SA data are situated in a larger cross-linguistic context. The section on verbal number constitutes a first comparative account of this phenomenon in SA languages. It is shown that both types of verbal number (i.e. event number and participant number) are widespread in SA, occurring in most language families surveyed. Teasing apart verbal number (of the participant plurality type) and nominal number manifested on the verb (argument indexing) turns out to be an interesting challenge for SA, with many intermediate cases.
... LaPolla does not elaborate on (possible) other uses of the hearsay-inferential combination, so it seems to be exclusively used for folklore coding. A potential further example is attested in Jarawara, where a combination of non-first-hand and reported appears for folklore (Aikhenvald 2012: 270), but the use of the reported evidential for this function is not obligatory even though it appears in 90% of the cases (see also Dixon 2004: 203 for a different view on this). Finally, Matses, discussed in Section 3.1, could also be seen as an example of Type 5 but Matses is not considered a Type 5 language here because one of the markers involved (topic continuity suffix) is not related to evidentiality in any way. ...
Folklore refers to information that we have learnt as a part of the history of our own people and that has passed on from generation to generation for hundreds, or even thousands of years. This paper shows that as an information source folklore has features in common with other information sources, most notably hearsay, but it nevertheless constitutes an information source of its own, characterized as [−personal] [−direct] and [+internalized]. In addition, the paper proposes a formal-functional typology based on the element used for folklore coding. It is also shown that the semantic similarity of the coded element with the proposed definition of folklore corresponds to its frequency. Finally, the paper discusses the central theoretical implications this study has for our understanding of evidentiality.
... Others are more specific, such as =rich'o 'still', =cho'o 'still', 'for a short time', 'not yet' (with negation), =wore 'once again, also', and =ojno resumptive. Aspect marking on nominals is also described for Jarawara by Dixon (2004), Ayoreo by Bertinetto (2009), and Chorote by Carol (2015), all languages also indigenous to South America. ...
... We (CE) have previously visited villages of three of the Arawá cultures highlighted in Fig. 4. Our interactions with these cultures include some research on Jarawara number words, and our transcriptions of the language's numbers include labiodentals 29 . More critically, labiodentals are found in the transcriptions made by Arawá family specialists [30][31][32][33] . The prevalence of Arawá labiodentals in the ASJP data and in other sources, including our own work, would appear to suggest that these sounds are ancient in the family. ...
We test the hypothesis that a specific anatomical feature, the dental malocclusion associated with reduced dental wear, causes languages to adapt by relying more heavily on labiodental consonants. In contrast to previous work on this topic, we adopt a usage-based approach that directly examines the relative frequency of such labiodental sounds within phonetically transcribed word lists and texts from thousands of languages. Labiodentals are shown to be very infrequent in the languages of hunter gatherers, who tend to have edge-to-edge bites as opposed to the overbite and overjet observed in populations that consume softer diets and rely heavily on eating utensils. This strong tendency is evident after controlling for Galton’s problem via multiple methods including frequentist and Bayesian linear mixed modeling. Additionally, we discuss data from Amazonian hunter gatherers with edge-to-edge bites. The languages of these populations are shown not to use labiodentals frequently, or to have only recently begun doing so. Finally, we analyze the speech of English speakers with varying bite types, demonstrating how the sounds used by individuals reflect the same phenomenon. The diverse findings converge on the same conclusion: speech adapts to anatomical differences within and across populations.
... LaPolla does not elaborate on (possible) other uses of the hearsay-inferential combination, so it seems to be exclusively used for folklore coding. A potential further example is attested in Jarawara, where a combination of non-first-hand and reported appears for folklore (Aikhenvald 2012: 270), but the use of the reported evidential for this function is not obligatory even though it appears in 90% of the cases (see also Dixon 2004: 203 for a different view on this). Finally, Matses, discussed in Section 3.1, could also be seen as an example of Type 5 but Matses is not considered a Type 5 language here because one of the markers involved (topic continuity suffix) is not related to evidentiality in any way. ...
Folklore refers to information that we have learnt as a part of the history of our own people and that has passed on from generation to generation for hundreds, or even thousands of years. This paper shows that as an information source folklore has features in common with other information sources, most notably hearsay, but it nevertheless constitutes an information source of its own, characterized as [−personal] [−direct] and [+internalized]. In addition, the paper proposes a formal-functional typology based on the element used for folklore coding. It is also shown that the semantic similarity of the coded element with the proposed definition of folklore corresponds to its frequency. Finally, the paper discusses the central theoretical implications this study has for our understanding of evidentiality.
... tamoco-be(j) 'frequently encountered dog'. Dixon (2004) reports Jarawara sentences featuring the 'habitual' (or rather, gnomic) morpheme -tee-, which may yield generic/habitual sentences when attached to verbs (15a), or assign a noun a persistent qualification (15b). 12 In the latter example, the woman referred to is characterized, at the given moment, as a future wife. ...
Nordlinger & Sadler’s (2004. Nominal tense in crosslinguistic perspective. Language 80. 776–806) seminal work fostered an intense debate on the semantics of nominal tense systems, with the side effect of widening the typological coverage of this grammatical feature. This paper aims at contributing to the ongoing debate. In contrast with work by Tonhauser, who excluded ‘tense’ as a semantic component of the Paraguayan Guaraní nominal tense system, the paper claims that all TAM dimensions are involved – temporality, aspect, modality – with different proportions in the individual markers. Most importantly, it claims that nominal tense does not presuppose a semantics of its own, other than the one needed for verbal tenses. Moreover, the paper presents evidence that the semantic component of aspect, besides being necessarily activated in any nominal tense marker, is also directly conveyed by some of them, which can legitimately be called ‘nominal aspect’ markers. This integrates Nordlinger & Sadler’s (2004) survey, in which aspect was notably absent. In addition, the paper points out possible cases of nominal actionality (a.k.a. Aktionsart). Finally, the paper suggests that the pervasive presence of aspect (and also, but rarely, actionality) among nominal tense markers finds interesting parallels in some types of deverbal nominalizations, although these belong in another grammatical drawer.
... 15 . This is not active-passive, but similar to the choice of A construction vs. O construction in Jawarawa, discussed by Dixon (2000Dixon ( , 2004, depending on what is considered to be the Topic of the clause, just with more choices for Topic than just A and O. 16 . It happens that in this line the speaker has embedded the relevant clause with the Actor-Topic-marked predicate as the Topic of the main clause (the X in 'X is easy'), but the phenomenon of Actor-Topic marking is the same whether it is a main clause or embedded. ...
... Specifically, in Dení, the second closest language to Kulina, there are negative suffixes -ra and -phira (Koop 1977(Koop [2008: 18, 20, 25). In Jarawara and in the other languages of the Madi language cluster, standard negation is marked by the suffixes -ra 'NEG.F' / -re 'NEG.M' (Dixon 2004b(Dixon , 1999. In the more distantly related Paumari, we also find the negative verb suffix -ri /-ra (in addition to the negative proclitic ni-) (Chapman & Derbyshire 1991). ...
This study reconstructs the development of a negative existential and a negative pro-sentence in the Arawan language Kulina (Brazil-Peru). We demonstrate that the two elements forming the negative existential construction nowe (hi)ra- are involved in a double polarity swap: (i) an originally neutral lexical item (the dynamic verb nowe ‘show’) has become negative through contamination, and (ii) an originally negative element (hi)ra- , which was responsible for the contamination, is bleaching into a semantically neutral auxiliary. This lexeme nowe , with the auxiliary used only optionally, also functions as a negative pro-sentence now. Thus, synchronically we have a negative pro-sentence that has its origin in a semantically-neutral lexical item. Neither the source of the negative pro-sentence nor this diachronic path has surfaced in the literature on negation so far and thus they are instructive from diachronic and typological perspectives. The hypothesis enriches the literature on both the Jespersen Cycle and the Negative Existential Cycle.
... 15 . This is not active-passive, but similar to the choice of A construction vs. O construction in Jawarawa, discussed by Dixon (2000Dixon ( , 2004, depending on what is considered to be the Topic of the clause, just with more choices for Topic than just A and O. 16 . It happens that in this line the speaker has embedded the relevant clause with the Actor-Topic-marked predicate as the Topic of the main clause (the X in 'X is easy'), but the phenomenon of Actor-Topic marking is the same whether it is a main clause or embedded. ...
This study offers a grammatical description of the Suruwahá language, which belongs to the Arawá language family and is spoken by a community of 156 members in southern Amazonas, Brazil. The Suruwahá language has been the subject of only a few previous publications, all of which focused on its phonology. The current study covers the language's phonology, morphology, and syntax, with a particular focus on the morphosyntax of nouns and verbs, including topics such as quantification, modification, nominal tense, gender, determiners, relative clauses, possession, case marking, the marking of information structure, person and number agreement, directional and locational affixes, Aktionsart, negation, valency, and the tense-aspect-mood-evidentiality system. The description is based on an existing corpus of linguistic data collected by the author through long-term involvement and interaction with the Suruwahá community. This grammatical description of the Suruwahá language is expected to serve as a foundation for the future development of bilingual teaching materials, thereby bridging the existing communication gap between the Suruwahá and the outside world.
In earlier research, the sociative causative has been considered a subcategory of a prototypical causative and not a category of its own. In the sociative causative the causer both initiates the event and participates in it, unlike in the prototypical causative in which the causer is only the initiator. It has been proposed that the causer can participate in the event either by acting together with the causee, helping the causee, or supervising the causee. The sociative causative can be marked on the predicate by using a specific sociative causative marker or it can be a reading of a prototypical causative construction or a reading of an applicative. It has been proposed in the previous literature that the sociative causative is an areal feature of the South American indigenous languages, and 26 languages were previously known to have sociative causative. In addition to these 26 languages, a genealogically balanced sampling method was applied and four more languages with sociative causative function were found. The 30 languages were analyzed formally and semantically. The analysis shows that the sociative causative usually describes the type of causation in which the causer is a co-actor with the causee or the causer helps the causee. The supervision type of sociative causation, however, occurred rarely. The sociative causative tends to be used with intransitive verbs that express motion or physical activity.
Studies on individual Amazonian languages have shown that these languages can contribute to informing and refining our theories of counterfactual conditional constructions. Still missing, however, is an attempt at exploring this complex sentence construction across different genetic units of the Amazonia in a single study. The paper explores counterfactual conditionals in a sample of 24 Amazonian languages. Special attention is paid to the range of TAM markers and clause-linking devices used in counterfactual conditionals in the Amazonian languages in the sample. As for TAM markers, it is shown that protases tend to be unmarked (they do not occur with any TAM values), and apodoses tend to occur with irrealis or frustrative marking. As for clause-linking devices, it is shown that most Amazonian languages in the sample contain counterfactual conditionals occurring with non-specialized clause-linking devices. This means that the distinction between counterfactual conditionals and other types of conditionals (e.g., real/generic) is not grammaticalized in clause-linking devices. Instead, the counterfactual conditional meaning resides in the combination of specific TAM markers. The paper also pays close attention to the distribution of TAM markers and clause-linking devices in counterfactual conditional constructions in the Vaupés. In particular, special attention is paid to how Tariana counterfactual conditional construction have been shaped by Tucanoan languages through language contact.
While speed is a secondary parameter in some associated motion systems, some languages have verbal affixes dedicated to the encoding of speed – celerative markers. Celeratives can encode both quick and slow speed and are in some languages even the main or the sole way of expressing this meaning. However, some morphemes not only encode speed, but also other types of action manner , in particular hurry or suddenness, following colexification patterns also observed in the lexicon crosslinguistically. This paper provides a first overview of this category in the world’s languages, and more generally suggests that action manner constitutes a set of comparative concepts that can be be encoded morphologically.
Linguistic typology is an all-embracing discipline central for inductively-based cross-linguistic generalizations, supported by language facts. Firsthand investigation of previously undescribed languages from regions known for their linguistic diversity helps expand our knowledge about the nature of language and the parameters of cross-linguistic variation. We explore the options of marking commands in a non-main clause and the issue of associative non-singular number in Yalaku and in Manambu (from Papua New Guinea), before turning to nominal aspect and non-propositional evidentiality (exemplified with Tariana and Jarawara, from Brazilian Amazonia). Previously undescribed languages help typologists expand and test our analytic frameworks
This article aims to fill a gap in the typological literature by discussing the typology of overt denominal verb formation strategies, that is, morphosyntactic strategies other than conversion/zero‐derivation that are used to derive a verb from a nominal base. We analyse the morphological, syntactic and semantic properties of these strategies in a variety sample of 222 languages. These properties include the morphological status, the productivity, and the semantic effects of the overt verbaliser, as well as the features of the nominal base and the polysemy patterns that characterise verbalisers across languages. The typological survey is complemented by a section on the diachronic typology of overt denominal verb formation strategies, in which we identify the most common diachronic sources of overt verbalisers and discuss the diachronic dynamics that involve them in relation to other denominal verb formation strategies such as conversion/zero‐derivation.
We focus on the grammatical expression of four major groups of meanings related to knowledge: I. Evidentiality: grammatical expression of information source; II. Egophoricity: grammatical expression of access to knowledge; III. Mirativity: grammatical expression of expectation of knowledge; and IV. Epistemic modality: grammatical expression of attitude to knowledge. The four groups of categories interact. Some develop overtones of the others. Epistemic-directed evidentials have additional meanings typical of epistemic modalities, while egophoricity-directed evidentials combine some reference to access to knowledge by speaker and addressee. Over the past thirty years, new evidential choices have evolved among the Tariana – whose language has five evidential terms in an egophoricity-directed system – to reflect new ways of acquiring information, including radio, television, phone, and internet. Evidentials stand apart from other means of knowledge-related categories as tokens of language ecology corroborated by their sensitivity to the changing social environment.
Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) is a theory of language in which linguistic structures are accounted for in terms of the interplay of discourse, semantics and syntax. With contributions from a team of leading scholars, this Handbook provides a field-defining overview of RRG. Assuming no prior knowledge, it introduces the framework step-by-step, and includes a pedagogical guide for instructors. It features in-depth discussions of syntax, morphology, and lexical semantics, including treatments of lexical and grammatical categories, the syntax of simple clauses and complex sentences, and how the linking of syntax with semantics and discourse works in each of these domains. It illustrates RRG's contribution to the study of language acquisition, language change and processing, computational linguistics, and neurolinguistics, and also contains five grammatical sketches which show how RRG analyses work in practice. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for anyone who is interested in how grammar interfaces with meaning.
This paper is the first survey of verbal affixes encoding the day period (‘at night’,‘in the morning’ etc.) or the yearly seasons (‘in winter’ etc.) when the action takes place. It introduces the term ‘periodic tense’ to refer to this comparative concept, explores the attested paradigms, their interactions with other verbal categories (including the more usual deictic tense), and investigates their diachronic origins. It shows that periodic tense markers are not restricted to incorporated nouns of time period but constitute a highly grammaticalized verbal category in some languages, which can redundantly co-occur with free adverbs or nouns indicating time.
The volume deals with the multifaceted nature of morphological complexity understood as a composite rather than unitary phenomenon as it shows an amazing degree of crosslinguistic variation. It features an Introduction by the editors that critically discusses some of the foundational assumptions informing contemporary views on morphological complexity, eleven chapters authored by an excellent set of contributors, and a concluding chapter by Östen Dahl that reviews various approaches to morphological complexity addressed in the preceding contributions and focuses on the minimum description length approach. The central eleven chapters approach morphological complexity from different perspectives, including the language-particular, the crosslinguistic, and the acquisitional one, and offer insights into issues such as the quantification of morphological complexity, its syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic aspects, diachronic developments including the emergence and acquisition of complexity, and the relations between morphological complexity and socioecological parameters of language. The empirical evidence includes data from both better-known languages such as Russian, and lesser-known and underdescribed languages from Africa, Australia, and the Americas, as well as experimental data drawn from iterated artificial language learning.
This investigation offers an analysis of the variation in the expression of purpose relations in a sample of 49 Amazonian languages. The most common strategies are conjunctions and converbs. Interestingly, in a number of Amazonian languages, positive purpose meanings are expressed with a conjunction or a converb in combination with other morphosyntactic properties. We briefly examine the areality of positive purpose clause-linkage patterns in four contact zones in the Amazonia: the Vaupés region, the Caquetá-Putumayo region, the Southern Guiana region, and the Marañon-Huallaga region. Besides analyzing the range of ways by which positive purpose clauses are realized in the sample, we also investigate avertive clauses in a number of languages of the database. Amazonian languages show an interesting typological picture in that they tend to have avertive markers which may be intraclausal or relational.
The chapter focuses on area diffusion and linguistic areas in the Amazon Basin, one of the linguistically most diverse regions in the world. The long-term history of language interaction in the linguistically highly diverse basin of the Amazon Basin has been marred by a large scale language extinction and obliteration of contact patterns. At present, the Vaupés River Basin area is the best established linguistic area. Linguistic and cultural features of neighbouring languages in the Upper Rio Negro region, and in the basin of neighbouring Caquetá and Putumayo, point towards possible areal diffusion in the past. The Upper Xingu region is a well-established cultural area; however, given its relatively shallow time depth, its status as a linguistic area is questionable. A number of other regions within Amazonia show traces of possible language contact with inconclusive evidence in favour of long-standing areal diffusion. A number of pan-Amazonian features are shared by genetically unrelated, and often geographically remote, languages. These may well reflect traces of linguistic contact that can no longer be recovered.
Language contact - the linguistic and social outcomes of two or more languages coming into contact with each other - has been pervasive in human history. However, where histories of language contact are comparable, experiences of migrant populations have been only similar, not identical. Given this, how does language contact work? With contributions from an international team of scholars, this Handbook - the first in a two-volume set - delves into this question from multiple perspectives and provides state-of-the-art research on population movement and language contact and change. It begins with an overview of how language contact as a research area has evolved since the late 19th century. The chapters then cover various processes and theoretical issues associated with population movement and language contact worldwide. It is essential reading for anybody interested in the dynamics of social interactions in diverse contact settings and how the changing ecologies influence the linguistic outcomes.
Linguistics and philosophy, while being two closely-related fields, are often approached with very different methodologies and frameworks. Bringing together a team of interdisciplinary scholars, this pioneering book provides examples of how conversations between the two disciplines can lead to exciting developments in both fields, from both a historical and a current perspective. It identifies a number of key phenomena at the cutting edge of research within both fields, such as reporting and ascribing, describing and referring, narrating and structuring, locating in time and space, typologizing and ontologizing, determining and questioning, arguing and rejecting, and implying and (pre-)supposing. Each chapter takes on a phenomena and explores it through a set of questions which are posed and answered at the outset of each chapter. An accessible and engaging resource, it is essential reading for researchers and students in both disciplines, and will empower exciting and illuminating conversations for years to come.
Linguistics and philosophy, while being two closely-related fields, are often approached with very different methodologies and frameworks. Bringing together a team of interdisciplinary scholars, this pioneering book provides examples of how conversations between the two disciplines can lead to exciting developments in both fields, from both a historical and a current perspective. It identifies a number of key phenomena at the cutting edge of research within both fields, such as reporting and ascribing, describing and referring, narrating and structuring, locating in time and space, typologizing and ontologizing, determining and questioning, arguing and rejecting, and implying and (pre-)supposing. Each chapter takes on a phenomena and explores it through a set of questions which are posed and answered at the outset of each chapter. An accessible and engaging resource, it is essential reading for researchers and students in both disciplines, and will empower exciting and illuminating conversations for years to come.
Diminutives are typically nouns. However, verbs can also be diminutivised, i.e. marked for reduced intensity, duration, seriousness or success of the action or event. This paper is a first attempt at a typology of verbal diminutives, based on a balanced sample of 248 languages. We discuss the analytical and terminological challenges that arise from the study of a category that is not widely recognised and does not have an established place in grammatical descriptions. Our sample shows that verbal diminutives occur across the world, with a slightly higher predominance in the Americas and somewhat fewer cases in Africa. Among the language families, Austronesian has the highest percentage of verbal diminutives in our sample. We present our results for the various formal exponents of verbal diminution on the one hand and the array of semantic effects on the other. Meanings are separated into three categories: attenuation in quantity, attenuation in quality and affective meanings. In many cases, markers of verbal diminution encode additional meanings, some of which contradict the core meaning of attenuation by expressing intensity, durativity or iteration. Such apparent paradoxes have parallels in nominal diminutives. The paper closes with recommendations for further research.
Este estudo objetiva analisar e descrever, nas variedades da língua portuguesa, as propriedades pragmáticas, semânticas, morfossintáticas e fonológicas da coordenação adversativa não oracional, i.e., da coordenação adversativa em que pelo menos um dos membros coordenados é não oracional (palavra ou sintagma), restringindo-se aos casos em que a coordenação ocorre por meio de “mas”. O referencial teórico adotado é o da Gramática Discursivo-Funcional (GDF). A GDF é um modelo teórico que leva em consideração a natureza situada da comunicação linguística, i.e., ela prevê a inter-relação entre linguagem e contexto. Seu modelo apresenta uma arquitetura modular com organização descendente (top down), i.e., da intenção para a forma das expressões linguísticas, de modo que a pragmática governa a semântica, ambas governam a morfossintaxe, e a pragmática, a semântica e a morfossintaxe governam a fonologia. Como universo de análise, são utilizados materiais obtidos do córpus Português Falado, que traz amostragens de variedades do português de toda a lusofonia. Com o objetivo de ampliar a amostragem sob análise, são acrescentados dados extraídos do córpus Iboruna, representativo da fala do noroeste paulista. Além disso, quando estritamente necessário, são coletados dados de língua escrita da Internet. A análise pragmática da coordenação adversativa não oracional mostra que cada um de seus membros consiste em um Ato Discursivo, a menor unidade de comportamento comunicativo, podendo relacionar um nuclear e um subsidiário que ora exerce a função retórica Concessão, ora a função retórica Esclarecimento, ou dois Conteúdos Comunicados, de diferentes Atos Discursivos, em que informações são cotejadas, indicando a função pragmática Contraste. A análise semântica, por sua vez, mostra que cada membro consiste em um Conteúdo Proposicional, expresso por diferentes categorias semânticas, havendo, nos casos de Contraste, um operador de negação, seja no primeiro membro coordenado, se o Falante deseja substituir uma informação da representação mental do Ouvinte, seja no segundo membro combinado, com o objetivo de esclarecer uma informação que o Falante considera comunicativamente inadequada. Morfossintaticamente, a coordenação adversativa não oracional é mapeada por duas unidades sem relação de constituência entre elas. Como ambas são morfossintaticamente independentes uma da outra, trata-se do processo de Coordenação, quando, juntas, formam uma Expressão Linguística, ou de Empilhamento, caso em que duas unidades funcionalmente equivalentes integram uma Oração. Fonologicamente, os dois membros constituem Frases Entonacionais, que dispõem de um contorno entonacional próprio. O primeiro membro apresenta o padrão entonacional complexo descendente-ascendente nas ocorrências de Concessão, e, nas de Contraste, exibe o padrão entonacional descendente ou complexo ascendente-descendente. Por fim, este estudo permite concluir que “mas”, na coordenação adversativa não oracional, é um expediente gramatical que se origina no Nível Interpessoal, i.e., no nível de análise que diz respeito às faculdades retóricas e pragmáticas das expressões linguísticas, estando, portanto, a serviço das relações inter-humanas que a linguagem institui.
The article deals with attributive modification in South American languages. It focuses on descriptive terms that denote properties. First of all, it is observed that attributive modification with property terms is possible in most, but not all South American languages. The typology of attributive constructions is argued to constitute a continuum, from syntactically loose nominal expressions, on the one hand, to morphologically complex structures which are ambiguous between compounding and derivation, on the other hand. The latter involves the use of lexico-grammatical means such as classifiers. The paper also raises the question of a possible diachronic link – at least for some languages – between intransitive clauses and postnominal property terms, which are often verbal in nature.
Chamacoco is an endangered language spoken by about 2,000 people in northern Paraguay. It belongs to the small Zamucoan family, also consisting of Ayoreo and †Old Zamuco (Bolivia/Paraguay). Chamacoco is the most innovative language of its small family. At the turn of the 19th century, the Chamacoco established permanent relationships with Paraguayan settlers, and they gradually lost a large part of their traditional culture. The fact that nowadays almost all of them are bilingual Chamacoco-Spanish involves ongoing linguistic change. On the one hand, this results in the loss of original elements, on the other, the merge of pattern and matter borrowings from Spanish with Zamucoan elements creates new linguistic diversity, which will lead, in the long run, to a new, mixed language. Indeed, although endangered, the Chamacoco language is still very vital and is transmitted to the younger generation, since it is nowadays the main element of cultural identity for its speakers. In this paper, I will address the changes in Chamacoco lexicon and inflectional morphology caused by contact with Spanish, pointing out how borrowings are adapted into the language, which pieces of morphology extend to loans, and how this contributes to keeping the two languages distinct, thus avoiding intelligibility by Spanish speakers.
A Negação é uma forma de conceber a organização do mundo de forma contrária ao que se espera na realidade. Nas línguas naturais, a Negação é um complexo fenomenológico ímpar, uma vez que a realidade extralinguística pode ser negada em sua totalidade ou, apenas, parcialmente. Nas línguas nativas brasileiras, essa forma de conceber o mundo parece ser mais ressaltada: cognitivamente, a forma como alguns povos concebem o mundo é distinta daquela por meio da qual o concebemos. Neste trabalho, em busca de uma generalidade de um grupo de línguas nativas, cotejamos duas categorias gramaticais, quais sejam: a expressão da negação e a codificação da função contraste. Trata-se de um trabalho ainda incipiente, à luz da Gramática Discursivo-Funcional (HENGEVELD; MACKENZIE, 2008), que atesta possíveis relações entre esses elementos. À guisa de conclusão, identificamos uma relação lógico-semântica entre essas categorias que, em certa medida, parece ser encontrada em línguas nativas brasileiras.
Negation is a way of conceiving the organization of the world in a way contrary to what is expected in reality. In natural languages, Negation is a unique phenomenological complex since extralinguistic reality can be negated in its totality or onlypartially. In Brazilian native languages, this way of conceiving the world seems to be more emphasized: cognitively, the way in which some peoples conceive the world is different from that through which we conceive it. In this work, we compare two grammaticalcategories in search of a generality of a group of native languages: the expression of negation and the codification of the contrast function. It is still an incipient work, in the light of the Discursive-Functional Grammar (HENGEVELD; MACKENZIE, 2008), which attests to possible relations between these elements. Anyhow, in a partial conclusion, we identified a logical-semantic relationship between these categories that, to some extent, can be found in Brazilian native languages.
This article shows how the unearthing of new historical data on a language can contribute to diachronic studies and language reconstruction. †Old Zamuco is an extinct Zamucoan language, for which the only extant dictionary was recently rediscovered. This dictionary is the main source on the language and is very rich in morphological information. In particular, it contains many new verb paradigms with previously undescribed or only conjectured characteristics. These features were analyzed in order to compare them with the present‐day Zamucoan languages, Ayoreo and Chamacoco. This gave us the opportunity to formulate hypotheses on the historical development of Zamucoan verb morphology and to improve the already available reconstruction of Proto‐Zamucoan verb inflection.
In most Arawak languages, obligatorily possessed nouns are bound forms. They have to be accompanied by a possessor. If the possessor is unknown or irrelevant, the noun will take the non‐specified possessor suffix. A suffix of the same segmental form occurs in deverbal nominalizations with unspecified arguments, or as a nominalizer on verbs. We hypothesise that the non‐specified possessor suffix was originally a feature of obligatorily possessed nouns denoting body parts and a selection of culturally important items (including ‘house’) but not kinship terms. The common Arawak polysemy of a non‐specified possessor marker and a nominalizer, reconstructible for the proto‐language, appears to be cross‐linguistically rare.
Este artigo trata dos marcadores de evidencialidade no português do Brasil. O português não tem marcadores de evidencialidade obrigatórios e gramaticalizados. Contudo, de uma perspectiva geolinguística, coloca-se a questão de se saber se o contacto com línguas com tais marcadores tem algum impacto no tipo e frequência de marcação de evidencialidade no português do Brasil. Primeiro, serão discutidas algumas expressões de evidencialidade em línguas indígenas no território brasileiro. Depois serão introduzidos alguns marcadores de evidencialidade, em particular diz que e parece que, e discutidas as suas funções. Muitos dos usos destes marcadores de evidencialidade não permitem a atribuição a tipos específicos de evidencialidade. Globalmente, pode concluir-se que o contacto com línguas com evidencialidade gramaticalizada pode ter contribuído para a elevada frequência de marcadores de evidencialidade no português do Brasil, mas não resultou em empréstimos de formas ou demarcações de tipos de evidencialidade.
The ability to differentiate old (definite) and new (indefinite) information is necessary for successful human communication (Evans and Levinson, 2009:437). Definite articles are one method of indicating that information is old, but these are present in fewer than half of the world’s languages (Dryer, 2013a). If indicating definiteness in discourse is essential for communicative success, it stands to reason that languages without definite articles communicate this information through alternate means. This dissertation investigates why definite articles might fail to emerge in a language and asks whether or not the use of specific morphosyntactic properties can be used to predict the absence of a definite article. It also asks whether or not alternate cues can be used to predict
that a referent will be definite in languages that lack a definite article.
To determine whether or not a relationship exists between the use of specific morphosyntactic properties and the emergence of definite articles, I conducted a grammar-mining study of 100 typologically diverse languages. These languages were coded for the presence or absence of ten morphosyntactic properties, including the use of definite articles. Random forest and conditional inference models were used to test whether or not the absence of a definite article could be predicted based on other elements in a language. To determine whether or not alternate cues can be
used to predict definiteness, I also conducted corpus studies of Colloquial Jakarta Indonesian and Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), two languages without articles. Logistic regression, random forest, and conditional inference models were used to determine if language-specific properties could be used to predict whether or not a discourse referent would be definite. The results of this research show that languages with case marking, OV word order, flexible subject order, and ergative or split ergative alignment are less likely than other languages to develop a definite article. They also show that in Colloquial Jakarta Indonesian and Kalaallisut, elements such as word order and case could be used to predict whether or not a referent will be definite, even without the added benefit of context. These results suggest that semantic definiteness can be cued by properties other than definite articles, and that cognitive pressures toward efficiency depress the
likelihood of a definite article emerging in the presence of such cues.
Tariana, an Arawak language from Brazil, has nominal markers which convey temporal and aspectual information about the noun phrase. Besides nominal future, there is a distinction between completed and non-completed nominal pasts. The completed nominal past has three meanings – decessive (‘late, gone’), temporal (‘former’), and commiserative or deprecatory (‘poor thing’). The latter is only applicable to humans and higher animates. The non-completed nominal past has a further semantic component of relevance of the state or property for the present time. The usage of the markers is governed by the principle of communicative necessity – in contrast to clausal, or propositional, tense-cum-evidentiality markers which are always obligatory. Having special means for expressing tense, aspect and relevance within a noun phrase – distinct from tense and aspect categories with clausal scope – constitutes a typologically rare feature of the language.
The aim of this book is to give the first large-scale typological investigation of pluractionality in the languages of the world. Pluractionality is defined as the morphological modification of the verb to express a plurality of situations that can additionally involve a plurality of participants and/or spaces. Based on a 246-language sample, the main characteristics of pluractionality are described and discussed throughout the book. Firstly, a description of the functions that pluractional markers cross-linguistically express is presented and the relationships occurring among them are explained through the semantic map model. Then, the marking strategies that languages display to express such functions are illustrated and some issues concerning the formal identification are briefly discussed as well. The typological generalizations are corroborated showing how pluractional markers work in three specific languages (Akawaio, Beja, Maa). In conclusion, the theoretical conceptualization of pluractionality is discussed referring to the Radical Construction Grammar approach.
Talk presented at Language and Culture Research Centre, James Cook University, Cairns. March 29, 2017.
The present contribution surveys prominent patterns in the typology of relative and adverbial clauses, with particular reference to the notion of embedding. To this end, we unfold the notion of embedding into a three-dimensional space consisting of a functional, a distributional and a formal axis along which a clause may be argued to be embedded into a (constituent of a) main clause. We show how these dimensions of embedding interact with each other to yield cross-linguistically recurrent subtypes of relative and adverbial clauses. In doing so, we also point to correlations between these dimensions and other grammatical properties of the non-argument clause, such as accessibility to relativization or the omissibility of overt markers of the embedding relationship.
Este trabalho apresenta os primeiros resultados de uma pesquisa tipológica sobre padrões de classificação nominal em línguas indígenas da América do Sul, Mais especificamente analisamos os padrões pelos quais argumentos de uma oração podem ser indexados por morfemas que os categorizam para além de dimensões semânticas dêiticas (como pessoa) e quantitativas (como número), focando em sistemas como gênero, classes nominais e classificadores. A partir de uma amostragem geográfica e filogeneticamente diversificada de línguas do continente, e uma discussão teórica sobre o que é classificação nominal e indexação de argumentos, domo objetivos principais, procuramos explorar as diferentes maneiras formais e semânticas como argumentos podem ser indexados, buscando generalizações entre tipos de sistemas de classificação nominal e sua correlação com outras categorias nominais expressas por verbos ou predicados. Também exploramos algumas generalizações greenberguianas entre padrões de classificação nominal nos verbos, no sintagma nominal e na palavra nominal. Como resultado, encontramos um conjunto de propriedades que servem para distinguir em um plano tipológico sistemas de gênero, classes nominais e classificadores. Argumentamos que essas diferenças tipológicas foram moldadas por forças diacrônicas distintas, a começar pela fonte dos sistemas de gênero, que são morfemas dêiticos como pronomes livres e demonstrativos, em contraste com compostos nominais que são a fonte dos sistemas de classificadores e classes nominais.
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