Brill's Studies in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas – serie

This book offers a comprehensive view of the morphology, syntax, and semantics of applicatives in Salish, a language family of northwestern North America. Applicative constructions, found in many polysynthetic languages, cast a semantically peripheral noun phrase as direct object. Drawing upon primary and secondary data from twenty Salish languages, the authors catalog the relationship between the form and function of seventeen applicative suffixes. The semantic role of the associated noun phrase and the verb class of the base are crucial factors in differentiating applicatives. Salish languages have two types of applicatives: relationals are formed on intransitive bases and redirectives on transitive ones. The historical development and discourse function of Salish applicatives are elucidated and placed in typological perspective.

One of the most complex topics in the study of the indigenous languages of the Americas, and indeed in the study of any language set, is the complex behaviour of multi-verb constructions. In many languages, several verbs can co-occur in a sentence, forming a single predicate. This book contains a first survey of such constructions in languages of North, Middle, and South America. Though it is not a systematic typological survey, the combined insights from the various chapters give a very rich perspective on this phenomenon, involving a host of typologically diverse constructions, including serial verb constructions, auxiliaries, co-verbs, phasal verbs, incorporated verbs, etc. Aikhenvald's long introduction puts the chapters into a single perspective.

In Benasní – I Remember: Dene Sųłiné Oral Histories with Morphological Analysis, Josh Holden presents twelve autobiographical narratives about cultural change from Dene Sųłiné elders in an Aboriginal community in northern Saskatchewan, Canada. In ten interviews and two monologues, the speakers recount their 20th century: the rhythms of traditional life, the catastrophe of epidemics and language loss, the dizzying technological changes, their ambivalence over the past and their anxieties for the future. Accompanying the original Dene texts and free translation is an analytical interlinear gloss applying rigorous morphological and semantic principles to the parsing and glossing of words. The innovative interlinearization distinguishes grammar from visible etymologies. The volume contains a morphological sketch to illuminate grammatical issues in the interlinearization.

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.Informed by typological approaches to negation, this volume will be of interest to specialists in Arawak languages, typologists, historical linguists, and theoretical linguists.

The morphological process of reduplication occurs in languages throughout the world. Reduplication in indigenous languages of South America is the first volume to focus on reduplication in South America. The indigenous languages of South America remain under-documented and little accessible to theoretical linguistics. Most regions and language families of the continent are represented in articles based on recent fieldwork by the authors. Included are data concerning a diverse set of reduplication phenomena from the Andes, Amazonia, and other regions of the continent. A wide range of language families and isolates are discussed, such as Tupian, Quechuan, Mapuche, Tacanan, Arawakan, Barbacoan, and Macro-Jê. Several languages present unusual properties, some of which violate presumed universals, such as no partial without full reduplication.

In A Grammar of Muylaq’ Aymara, Matt Coler provides a detailed description of a highly-endangered variety of Aymara spoken in the remote Andean village of Muylaque (Muylaq’i), in Southern Peru. This heretofore undescribed variety has many unique characteristics that shed light on the impressive extent of variation in Aymara.Using natural language data gathered during several field trips to Muylaque, Coler offers a detailed analysis of the phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax of Aymara. Additionally, A Grammar of Muylaq’ Aymara includes complete interlinear glosses for several personal narratives.A Grammar of Muylaq’ Aymara represents an important contribution not only to the study of Aymara, Aymara variation, and Andean languages, but also to research into linguistic typology and language contact.

This book presents unique insights into laryngeal features, one of the most intriguing topics of contemporary phonetics and phonology. It investigates in detail properties such as tone, non-modal phonation, non-pulmonic production mechanisms (as in ejectives or implosives), stress, and prosody. What makes American indigenous languages special is that many of these properties co-exist in the phonologies of languages spoken on the continent. Taking diverse theoretical perspectives, the contributions span a range of American languages, illustrating how the phonetics and phonology of laryngeal features provides insight into how potential articulatory and aero-acoustic conflicts are resolved, which contrastive laryngeal features can co-occur in a given language, which features pattern together in phonological processes and how they evolve over time. This contribution provides the most recent research on laryngeal features with an array of studies to expand and enrich the fascinating field of phonetics and phonology of the languages of the Americas.

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 a robust morphological distinction between male and female speech; the expression of TAM categories via fixed clitics; the encoding of three-place predicates by means of transitive clauses; six directive constructions that distinguish degrees of pragmatic force; and multiple types of purpose clauses that differ in terms of coreference control. This grammar also shows the Tupí-Guarani origin of an important number of Kukama-Kukamiria grammatical structures and advances comparative studies in the region.

In A Grammar of Murui (Bue), Katarzyna Wojtylak provides the first complete description of Murui, an endangered Witotoan language, spoken by the Murui-Muina (Witoto) people from Colombia and Peru. The grammar is written from a functional and typological perspective, using natural language data gathered during several fieldtrips to the Caquetá-Putumayo region between 2013 and 2017. The many remarkable characteristics of Murui include a complex system of classifiers, differential subject and object marking, person-marking verb morphology, evidential and epistemic marking, head-tail linkage, and a system of numerals, including the fraternal (brother-based) forms for ‘three’ and ‘four’. The grammar represents an important contribution to the study of Witotoan languages, linguistic typology of Northwest Amazonia, and language contact in the area.

This book, the first of its kind, is dedicated to different Spanish varieties spoken in the Amazonian regions of Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. The contributions present diverse perspectives on theoretical, methodological, and descriptive characterizations of the study of Amazonian Spanish. It includes linguistic (phonological, syntactic, discourse-pragmatic), typological, ethnographic, sociolinguistic, and language contact approaches. The analyses of oral corpora include comparisons between monolingual and contact varieties of the speech of bilingual speakers who are native speakers of an indigenous Amazonian variety. This collection contributes to the fields of Hispanic and Amerindian Linguistics, and language contact.

This volume presents the up-to-date results of investigations into the Asian origins of the only two language families of North America that are widely acknowledged as having likely genetic links in northern Asia. It brings together all that has been proposed to date under the respective rubrics of the Uralo-Siberian (Eskimo-Yukaghir-Uralic) hypothesis and the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis. The evolution of the two parallel research strategies for fleshing out these linguistic links between North America and Asia are compared and contrasted. Although focusing on stringently controlled linguistic reconstructions, the volume draws upon archaeological and human genetic data where relevant.